MGG Pillai Commentary View

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The politics of the RM200 million tuition plan for poor pupils

THERE IS NO TALK of it but general elections is in the air. The elections goodies have started flowing. The latest is this gimmick of tuition for poor pupils. What is not said is why Malaysian education, more so in the lower forms, is so bad. Why the Malaysian school child faces the world as an adult is woefully illiterate? Why is teaching so bad? Why do the education officials insist on adopting the latest buzz word in education overseas without adapting it to local conditions? How could it improve major changes are made at the spur of the moment and, often, without consulting those concerned? The vision school fiasco is one. Another is teaching science of mathematics in English. As, in 1971, when English was taken off the school curriculum. When education is reduced to a political agenda, political corruption, political second-guessing, can we be proud of it?

The government knows why but would not right it. The child is not helped into adulthood, only as a consuming digit for a life of irrelevance and made docile by a numbing mindlessness of dubious television entertainment. He who breaks out of it for a path of his own making had had to fight his way through the defeatist system Malaysian education is. No one wants to talk of this crisis in education. Every education minister has pet projects put to pasture when a new man takes over. The politician plays to the gallery, to fish for votes so he could rise high in the UMNO pecking order. The faults are hidden with some deft public relations: by focussing on those who obtain top marks in the public school examinations. The mailaise in Malaysian education is hidden and, in time, forgotten. Education, the government has decided, is too important to be left to educators; so administors and politicians "guide" them. Just look around you and you will see what I say.

Pupils in Forms Four, Five and Six from April would get tuition after school in Malay, English, Science and Mathematics. It would benefit 500,000 who would get RM 10 vouchers to pay for extra tuition, which their teachers would conduct. The Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, reasons: "We don't want poor puils to be unable to have tuition simply because they cannot afford it." Then the spin. "We hope parents will realise how beneficial the scheme is for their children in giving them a head start in their education." And it took the BN government 48 years in office to realise it? Or is yet another side of the new regime distancing itself from the old, and put in place the old did not look into or care. After all the education minister, Tan Sri Musa Mohamed, was education minister then as now. When did he come up with this brilliant idea? Why are schemes like this are not discussed in Parliament - since RM200 million is involed, one should imagine it would - and sprung on an unsuspecting public?

The scheme as usual is ill thought out. Tan Sri Musa is making up the rules as he goes. He has placed another load on teachers: they decide the subjects the pupils are weak in, and hand out the relevant vouchers. The teachers would not forced to do the exra classes, but they would be paid for running the tuition classes. The teachers are not the only one who can make extra money. Government doctors are now. They can have paying patients after work in the hospital where they work. The most important problem is ignored: Why? Is the declining standards so bad that the government must throw fiscal caution to the winds that it must rush through a scheme which would lose interest once the general elections is over?

The reaction to it is predictable. The gobbledygook is not far behind. A university lecturer, Mr Zamri Ahmad, - he is described suitably as the "University Putra Malaysia Communication Department Faculty of Modern Languages and Communications lecturer" - is worried that without "proper planning" and "time management" pupils would be "deprived of their play time". How would he rectify that? Reduce the afternoon session to 3 or 4 pm. He is certain the scheme is not open to abuse and make teachers want to teach more. How can he come to this conclusion when every other system is abused and ignored once the spotlight shifts? Another - "Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Social Linguistics and International Communication" Professor Saran Kaur Gill - saw no need for the tuition but "hard-working" teachers should be honoured for they "strive hard to ensure excellence". If she is right, something surely is wrong about the tuition plan.

But the Universiti Malaya's Professor Emeritus Khoo Kay Peng thinks the money is better spent to train teachers. In the past there was no need for tuition. The teachers were well trained then and often gave their best during school hours. But this many not work now. The teachers today teach to make extra money in after-school tuition. Like me, he is from the old school. We remember our teachers for the good they imparted to us. My life-long interest in reading came from the unusual teaching methods of now alas departed Mr Lim Teck Siang at the Johore English College [now the Maktab Sultan Abu Bakar] 50 years ago: I must have been slapped as often for not reading as not reading enough. But it left me with a love for the printed word that has taken me further than my formal education. And I remember those giants of the past who made me what I am today gratefully and with affection.

Education is to make one think. But you get into trouble if you do in Malaysia. When undergraduates question government policies, they are dubbed Opposition supporters and worse, detained under the ISA, expelled from the universities and worse. But there is hope yet. The younger Malaysians now in the universities and in the work place, shortchanged by their political leaders in the marketplace -- nearly 90,000 Malaysian university graduates in Malaysia cannot find jobs -- are alive to the world around them, find it wanting, and act. Which is why you find many of them in Opposition functions and precious few, unless bussed in and paid and suitably entertained, in National Front (BN) venues.

But in the tuition plan, the hustle is not far behind. The Federation of Peninsular Malay Students (GPMS), a pressure group of former students to hustle for business from the Government, has offered its good offices. Its president, Dato' Suhaimi Ibrahim, offers to work with the education ministry, guide and assist "on the correct way of conducting extra classes". We see the shift already to the political scene. The GPMS, of which the Prime Minister was once head of, in its earlier days was a strong UMNO vehicle in the schools and campuses. Today it is a pressure group paying lip service to education. What I find surprising is that the teachers' unions have so far kept their views to themselves. On what we know so far, it is limited to national schools, with the national-type and vernacular schools brought it if there is too much pressure from the ground. Curiously for a plan as important as we are told it is, the BN partners have welcomed it with a thunderous silence. Why, I wonder.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com