Malaysian education - from rot to risk!

In a home school, the kid does 95% of the work. But in a school system, since it's an indoctrination system, a teacher has to do 95% of the work.

- John Taylor Gatto

Three days ago, TMI published Fed up with policy flip-flops, brainwashing, parents turn to home-schooling, extracts as follows:

TMI photo 

An outdated school system, education policy flip-flops and religious indoctrination are among the reasons cited by parents who choose to home-school their children.

This is despite the fact that primary education is compulsory in Malaysia and permission from the Education Ministry is required if parents want to keep their children out of school, which is usually only granted if a child has severe health problems. [...]

Author Chong Wai Leng, who runs a support network blog for parents of home-schoolers called Learning Beyond Schooling, says there is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that the “unschooling” concept, as she prefers to call it, is growing and not limited to the main cities but smaller towns, such as Port Dickson and even in Kota Baru.

Another indication that home-schooling has more followers since it started in Malaysia more than 20 years ago is that there are more and more new faces, especially young parents of all races, spotted at events organised for home-schooled children.

Chong said there were many reasons parents opted to home-school their children, but one of the more recent factors was disillusionment with the schooling system, which she described as “messed up” and subject to policy flip-flops.

So, now not only Chinese parents are fed up with the UMNO-led government's continuing mess-up of our education system but some Malay parents have as well. 

In May 2011 I had written (yet again) on vernacular education in a post titled Being fair (1), in which I agreed with gasp gawd omigosh with Utusan's Awang Selamat, wakakaka, in his article (Malay Mail Online) No ‘1 Malaysia’ without unified school system, Utusan says. 

However, in my post I gave my take on why our f*-up education has come to run on three separate tracks in primary education (National stream, Chinese and Tamil), (extracts as follows):

Because successive UMNO Education Ministers turned the national education system into the lamentable political football it became, and consequentially with its inevitable abysmal standards, the Chinese gave up completely on that system and quietly sought alternative means, leading them to Chinese vernacular education. In pre-Merdeka days and even some years after that, the gold standard in education was English medium schools, not Chinese medium.

Thanks to the selfish actions of successive UMNO Education Ministers pushing Chinese parents into the eager waiting arms of the vernacular educationalists as a result of the country's worsening national education system, they caused the two Cinapek sides to ‘fall in love’ with each other. And the rest is history.

Ironically the Chinese vernacular schools in the late '50s and early '60s were almost driven into extinction by the lack of Chinese support.

That, the diminishing need by the pragmatic Chinese community for vernacular Chinese education and its eventual extinction or at least, near extinction, would undoubtedly have occurred except for the unpleasant fact of successive UMNO Education ministers and wannabe Education ministers turning Malaya/Malaysia's once-famed education system into the shit that Ku Li lamented over yesterday in a FMT article Our education system has failed.

Just for another use of the word 'ironical' wakakaka, I cannot resist reiterating that ironically it had been UMNO Education ministers who ‘saved’ Chinese vernacular education from extinction - do read my letter to Malaysiakini titled Chinese educationists must thank UMNO. Wakakaka.

I concluded that letter to Malaysiakini with the statement “The truth has been out there all this while”, by which I meant today's Chinese Malaysian obsession with Chinese vernacular education had its Genesis not so much in ethnocentric cultural parochialism but more in ensuring good solid educational standards for their children which was screwed up kau kau by those wonders who have been our education ministers.

And now a quote from the USA:

There were only two other Chinese families in this town of 25,000, but to our parents, the determining factor was the quality of the public school system.

- Steven Chu (American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics)

As if our notorious education per se has not been sufficiently messed up already, we now hear of insidious radical elements amidst our higher education system where poisonous racist indoctrinations have been taking place.

MM Online reports in Idris Jusoh must go, ex-minister says after exposing link to ‘brainwashing’ trainer  (extracts):

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 18 — Datuk Zaid Ibrahim today urged Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak to remove Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh as the higher education minister, claiming the latter’s alleged link to an education programme trainer with supposedly extremist views was tarnishing the “moderate” image of the federal Cabinet.

The former de facto law minister added that the trainer whose name was given as Mat Taib is known to run neuro-linguistic programmes for university lecturers, vice-chancellors and also teachers but often appeared to hold extremist views on social media.

He questioned if Idris condoned the views of Mat Taib.

“When I suggested that a documentary be filmed to explain the Indira Gandhi issue, and that it can be funded by raising money from the public, he said I should collect money from ‘DAP pigs and those NGOs who are anti-Islam and anti-Malay’,” Zaid wrote in his latest blog entry today, referring to Mat Taib.

“This is the quality of Malays that are roaming our universities. This is the type of Malay who is brainwashing younger Malays into having a dangerously skewed view of the world,” he added.

He said that such individuals would not have the platform to sell their “sick ideas” if it was not for an approval by the minister himself.

“Idris needs to answer for his relationship with Mat Taib. He needs to explain what he expects from the motivational courses that people like Mat Taib give and how our educationists will benefit from them,” he added.

This is frightening!

But when will we the voters stop these UMNO Education ministers from continuing with their rotten work?