Resolve Malaysia’s Education Crisis By Rejecting “One Size Fits All” Uniformity In Favour Of Customization That Returns To The Basic Principles Of Pursuing Excellence And The Teaching Of Cognitive And Non-Cognitive Skills.
Malaysia’s education crisis is in a downward spiral following the latest Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report on education assessment that only one out of 100 15-year-old Malaysian students able to solve complex problems. We are willing to work together with the Federal government to address the wide disparity between its best and worst performers in order to improve educational standards.
The 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) put Malaysia again at the bottom 25%, coming in at 39th out of 44 countries, in the test on creative problem-solving. Malaysian students had been assessed by PISA to be 3 years behind the best students in South Korea, Shanghai or Singapore, scoring below average and ranked 52 out of the 65 countries in mathematics, science and reading. What is shocking is that Malaysia is worse than Vietnam of Thailand in science and mathematics.
Whilst Malaysia invests more than 20% of our national budget in education, there is no value for money as such investment serves to satisfy the needs of bureaucrats rather than meet the aspirations of the students to acquire knowledge and skills in order to realise their talent and potential. For instance Malaysia spends less than Thailand in education for students in the first ten years of their education from 6 years to 15 years old.
Unless there is a mindset shift towards investment in education accompanied by high aspirations as a nation to build on human capital, how can we grow into a high-income developed economy? One solution towards resolving Malaysia’s education crisis is rejecting the stultifying “one size fits all” uniformity in favour of customization that returns to the basic principles of pursuing excellence and the teaching of cognitive and non-cognitive skills
The time has come to empower teachers by rewarding the best, getting the best out of them with cognitive and non-cognitive teaching and able to help students who fall behind. Malaysia has no choice but to develop a high-performing education systems that focus on both cognitive (factual knowledge) and non-cognitive (team work, leadership and communication) skills. We cannot permit our education to fail our economy.