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Media statement by Lim Guan Eng in Kuala Lumpur on Monday, 2nd April 2012: The World Economic Report's Global Competitiveness Index 2011-2012 actually contradicts Tan Sri Muhydin wild boasts Education Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, was quoted as saying that according to the World Economic Report's Global Competitiveness Index 2011-2012(Report), our children received a better quality of education than the children in the United States, Germany and United Kingdom. This is a grossly inaccurate statement designed purely for political propaganda that would only diminish the prestigious position of a Deputy Prime Minister. Not only is Tan Sri Muhyidin is in a state of denial by covering up the significant challenges, weaknesses and even defects in the Malaysian education system, he has made Malaysia an international laughing stock by claiming to be better than US, UK and Germany. If so, Tan Sri Muhyidin should answer why there is not a single Nobel Prize winner who is a Malaysian and neither is there a single Malaysian university amongst the Top 200 Universities in the world? Or when given the choice, why more Malaysian students want to study in US, UK and Germany than in Malaysian universities? Tan Sri Muhyidin is guilty of cherry picking or choosing selectively only those favorable statistics from this Report. The ranking of 14 which Malaysia received on the quality of education is just one indicator out of many, which measures different aspects at different levels of our education system. In almost all other measures on education, we are ranked lower than 21. For example:
Our Secondary Education Enrollment ranking of 101 is particularly worrying and points to a significant minority of students who dropped out after primary school and is thus deprived of a change to pursue a higher education. Our rank of 101 puts us below Thailand (Rank 94), Indonesia (Rank 91) Brunei (35) and Singapore (17) in the ASEAN region. Malaysia's relatively low performance on objective or non-subjective measures such as the primary, secondary and tertiary enrollment rates should be highlighted over and above that of executive survey opinion indicators such as the Quality of Education ranking. Hence, to highlight this subjective indicator and to ignore the other more objective indicators is highly irresponsible and diverts attention from the other serious problems in our education system, including that of high dropout rates leading to low enrollment rates especially at the secondary and tertiary levels. In almost all of these other indexes, Malaysia's performance is far from reassuring. For example, in the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) involving 75 countries, Malaysia was ranked 55th in reading ability, 57th in Mathematics ability and 52 in Science. Our performance in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) has also seen a steady decrease from 1999 to 2007. The overwhelming evidence from the data in the Report actually contradicts the wild boasts by Tan Sri Muhyidin and confirms that the UK, US and Germany education system is better than Malaysia. In fact the Report reveals that Malaysia have a long uphill climb before our access and average quality of education reaches world-class standards. The time has come for Malaysia's Education Ministry to boldly admit its weaknesses instead of hiding behind baseless boastings so that we can address these problems. *Lim Guan Eng, DAP Secretary General & MP for Bagan
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