Oyang Sen (C) Copyright January 2023

Give our children good schools and good teachers but not clandestine tuition classes if we are to give our children an education they need to cope in life ahead of them.

To conduct a special tuition session for a select group of students to prepare for a major nation wide examinations is wrong on many scores

First, it is seen as a move for the benefits of one racial group. The explanation from the Education Ministry that this was done so that the Chinese students were not interrupted in their Lunar New Year celebration was disingenuous - and it sounded hollow when it was pointed out that the other ethnic group, the Indian students were not included.

Second, if one of the objectives of an education is to imbue students with a sense of fairness and ethical values, then this covert exercise will surely not be able to generate the desired result.

Third, this scheme is considered seriously flawed because it will produce the opposite and adverse outcome it is designed for - students are unwittingly taught to take their education and possibly later in life their work with a sense of nonchalance as assistance can be expected as a matter of course.

Consciously or unconsciously, the idea that help and subsistence will always be there when needed or not, tend to creep into the psyche of students going through this mollycoddled exercise.

This sort of measure, if not nipped in the bud would invariably grow into an unintended full blown continuous policy structure will be difficult if not impossible to dismantle later on.

It is no secret that over the recent decades the standard of our education has declined across the entire gamut of our school system, from primary school to university levels.

There are several causes of this decline, which evolved gradually over the course of time. This gradual change unfortunately helped to blur the steady worsening of quality of the education dished out to our children. In trying to achieve better ways of improving the children’s knowledge, various initiatives and ideas were introduced and along the way some programs that  eventually proved to be detrimental and cumbersome were also ushered in.

In the main, certain assumptions made but implemented haphazardly turned out with unwelcome results. For example, rural children were and are still seen as having a disadvantage when compared to children in the cities and large towns in several aspects. Of course this is true to a large extent .

On the other hand, a very strong argument for improving the quality of education for our children lies elsewhere which is not difficult to find. Currently there are slightly more than 10,000 schools in the country. 

It must be assumed that the Ministry of Education uses a set of well tried out prescribed strategies to deal with this special set of circumstances that are supposed to be able to take the edge off any deficiencies and help improve the quality of rural students.

So far not much evidence is seen in the improvement of the quality of these students. What gives then? Is it difficult or sensible to assume that what we really need are good schools and good teachers.

A simple illustration might lend this statement credence.

Let’s go back to the 50s and 60s when the country was much poorer and much less developed than it is now. Then, there were good schools, English medium schools; Chinese and Malay medium schools were poorly organized then.

Perhaps a good example to seek a reasonably fair answer is from Kelantan - the original poor hinterland State. Then the population of the State was estimated to be well below half a million of whom majority were Malay. Most of the 3 large districts had a primary English medium school each.

Only Kota Bharu, the Capital city had two secondary English medium schools, one for girls and the other for boys. These two secondary schools took in rural students from small towns and tiny villages with names like Labok, Dabong and Pahi (a hamlet with less than 30 people, a few of whose homes had less than 4 walls). Both Zainab Girls School and Sultan Ismail College or SIC had good teachers.

Generally, college-trained teachers were assigned to the lower forms while university-graduate teachers conducted classes in the higher Forms (Forms 4 and 5). SIC had a couple English Headmasters until 1957. SIC also had a hostel that could accommodate 300 odd students from the far flung corners of the State including a few from the notorious Communists infested town, Gua Musang.

The schools were run very much in the model of the then English public schools in the U.K. - very orderly, disciplined and quite demanding.

There were lots extra curricula activities: sports and games, libraries, camping and picnics, including a Shakespearean play that became an annual affair. Many teachers gave free private tuitions sometimes in the teachers homes for students found to be weak in certain subjects. Teachers in those days were a dedicated lot. They were also a respected group in the local community.

Over those years in SIC Malay always made up more than 90% of the student population. And from this impoverished State, some very accomplished people pulled through the crowd and made Kelate proud.

They are too many of them to be named here (the real fear is that some might be missed out).

The point here is clear, many of these people were from a far off back water State and some were from tiny villages, or to put it in proper perspective: how rural or deprived could you get , and yet they came through life very well and successful because they had the good fortune of having gone through a well paced and well organized school education system.

So give our children good schools and good teachers.

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