.png)
I read this news while enjoying my morning coffee and nearly choked on it.
Not because it was shocking.
But because apparently, after all these years, our Higher Education Minister has finally discovered something the rest of us ordinary Malaysians have known for quite some time.
“Getting students into university is not the same as making them competent.”
Congratulations, Minister.
I suppose we should give credit where credit is due. It takes courage to stand before a convention and announce that perhaps the success of Malay and Bumiputera education should not simply be measured by how many students enter university, but by what they can actually do once they get there.
Apparently, we are now moving “from access to quality, from qualifications to competencies, from employment to entrepreneurship, and from using technology to owning technology.”
Wow.
Frankly, this isn't some revolutionary educational theory.
Give a student a place in university and you have given that student access. You have not automatically given them knowledge, critical thinking, curiosity, discipline or competence.
If students are arriving at university without the foundations they need to succeed, perhaps the solution isn't simply to debate university access. Perhaps we should ask what happened to their education long before they arrived at the university gates.
It is rather like discovering that your house has a leaking roof and responding by buying a bigger umbrella.
The minister also spoke about producing engineers, researchers, inventors, patent holders, company founders and industry leaders rather than merely operators of technology owned by others.
Again, absolutely.
But producing those people requires more than telling universities to produce them.
It requires an education system that rewards curiosity rather than conformity; one that teaches children to question rather than simply memorise; one that values competence rather than credentials.
And perhaps most importantly, one that is willing to acknowledge uncomfortable truths about the system instead of turning every discussion about educational outcomes into another argument over race and access.
There is something rather sad about the fact that we have spent so much time debating who gets into university that we sometimes forget to ask what happens when they get there.
The issue isn't that Malaysians took this long to understand that access alone doesn't guarantee quality.
The bigger problem is that the people in positions to improve the system seem to be taking this long to understand it.
That should worry us more.
Ordinary Malaysians don't have the luxury of discovering obvious things twenty years after everyone else.
Parents have to pay the bills. Students have to sit the exams. Teachers have to teach. Employers have to hire. Graduates have to find jobs.
Everyone else has to live with the consequences of educational policy.
So when a minister finally announces that perhaps we should focus on quality, competence, problem-solving and genuine capability, the appropriate response isn't outrage.
It's applause.
Slow applause.
Very slow.
The kind you give when someone finally arrives at a destination after everyone else has already been waiting there for years.
Still, better late than never.
Fa Abdul (fa.abdul.penang@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
The User Content (as defined on Newswav Terms of Use) above including the views expressed and media (pictures, videos, citations etc) were submitted & posted by the author. Newswav is solely an aggregation platform that hosts the User Content. If you have any questions about the content, copyright or other issues of the work, please contact creator@newswav.com.
