Last week, Deputy Education Minister P. Kamalanathan proudly declared that “Malaysians’ command of English is in fact better than Singapore’s” (http://www.malaysiakini.com/news/293540) and that Malaysia ranked number one among Asian countries in this aspect.
The Deputy Minister was either ignorant of the data at hand or lying to our faces.
This is hardly surprising from a federal Minister since it came fresh off the heels of Second Education Minister Idris Jusoh’s recent self-delusional pronouncement that our universities are “world-class”.
In making such statement the Deputy Minister contradicted many reports including the government’s own on this matter.
Deputy Minister contradicted the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025
It is sad that the Deputy Minister of Education, who is supposed to be one of the key custodians of the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025, seems to be so ignorant of its content.
According to the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025, “9% of students failed Bahasa Malaysia in SPM 2011, as compared to 23% for English language. At the other end of the spectrum, 30% of students received an excellent grade in Bahasa Malaysia, as compared to 16% in English language”. (MEB, p. 3-6)
This is also because we graded the students based on the local Examination Syndicate (Lembaga Peperiksaan) grading standard instead of the Cambridge International Examinations grading standard. If the latter, 50% of our Form 5 students failed to achieve minimum standards, while under the former, only about 20% were deemed to have failed. (MEB, Exhibit 3-19, p. 3-14)
Deputy Minister contradicted the government’s own reports
The Malaysia Education Blueprint Annual Report 2013 revealed that although 71% of our students obtained at least a “Credit” in Bahasa Malaysia in SPM 2013, only 45% obtained at least a “Credit” in the English language paper that year. (MEB Annual Report 2013, p. 53)
The Literacy and Numeracy Screening (LINUS) programme found that in 2013, only 63.3% of Year 1 students had basic proficiency in the English language. This was lower than the expected 67%. There is a huge gap between this and the targeted rate of 100% literacy by Year 3. Even the Education Ministry admitted that it will be difficult to achieve the set target as it will require an increase of more than 18% yearly, which is greater than the progress gained for Bahasa Malaysia and numeracy. (MEB Annual Report 2013, p. 53)
Deputy Minister contradicted World Bank report
According to World Bank Malaysia Economic Monitor 2013, “although English proficiency in Malaysia remains much higher than in other Asian countries, there is evidence that English language skills have been declining over time”. While some may take this as vindication of the government’s statement that we are better than many Asian countries, the context of the report points to the contrary. It showed that the older generations were much more proficient, perhaps due to the colonial English school system in the past. Even older teachers perform better than their younger counterparts in terms of English language proficiency, and the average performance also declines with age. (Malaysia Economic Monitor 2013, World Bank, p. 54)
Admit the problem and resolve it rather than pretend there is no problem
The is no dishonour in admitting one’s weaknesses and working towards improvement. Setting aside these weaknesses will not do us any good. But our problem is more acute, our Ministers are basically pretending that these weaknesses do not exist and everything is fine, and we are in fact doing very well. This once again is symptomatic of the government believing its own lies.