Politicised education come home to roost

FMT - Local grads only as good as Danish high school dropouts (extracts):

SUBANG JAYA: Malaysian graduates have been equated to Danish high school dropouts, despite the government having invested sufficient funds in education and impressive teaching tools in schools.

Harvard professor Lant Pritchett said he had carried out research in Indonesia and found the Indonesian situation to be similar to Malaysia’s.

“Research was done on graduates in Indonesia on literacy, creative thinking and on other aspects and the results were the same as junior high school dropouts in Denmark. The same features appear in Malaysia.

“The reason is because students leave primary school without mastering the subjects and the same with secondary (school students). By the time they reach the tertiary (level), they are left far behind. There is no deep understanding of the materials. Instead, it is rote memorisation, applying theory and regurgitating it during exams,” he told FMT.

Pritchett was in Malaysia for the Asia Public Policy Forum 2016 co-hosted by Harvard Kennedy School and the Jeffrey Cheah Institute of Southeast Asia here.

It's not that we are not aware of the dire drastic disastrous situation our educational standards have been, but it's the unbelievable unthinkable unimaginable sinkhole the state of the system has fallen so deeply into.

Also note that the root cause lie in the fundamentals, humongously UNacquired by the students as they should have during primary and secondary schoolings.

In other words, the students were not taught how to walk properly at schools but expected to run in universities.

That has been why I have been puzzled by kids finishing school with 17 A's (yes, seventeen, not seven). In my days we were smart when we managed to pass 9 (nine) subjects.

So how the f**k do kids today manage with 17 subjects? Now, I can just about imagine the shallowness of their school education.

If our local university graduates are only equivalent to Danish high school dropouts, yes, dropouts not successful school leavers, I wonder what they were doing in universities?

And our authorities wonder why our universities repetitively rank so abysmally low while those in Singapore, Hong Kong, and China always do well. 

Another finding has been the poor have been the far greater sufferers, the main victims of this piss-poor system, while the better off and rich kids have been better at coping.

All thanks to our series of Education Ministers like Mahathir, Anwar Ibrahim, Najib, Hishamuddin etc and their f**king political football called 'education'.

you started the whole mess

I passed it to Anwar to handle - blame him
besides I can't remember what I did, but I know I did very well , as always (but not counting forex, maminco, perwaja, proton, BTN, judiciary, senate, etc) 

John Holt, an American educator and author of How Children Fail, said:

We destroy the disinterested (I do not mean uninterested) love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards — gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A’s on report cards … in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else ... 

We kill, not only their curiosity, but their feeling that it is a good and admirable thing to be curious, so that by the age of ten most of them will not ask questions, and will show a good deal of scorn for the few who do.