Helping Or Condemning Children Of The Poor
Visited 166 times already, 2 so far todayStill on the recent controversial policy change on Math and Science, everyone should read this - especially those who voted YES.
Chaining The Children Of The Poor (click to read in full) by M. Bakri Musa, a Malaysian surgeon living in the USA
Make no mistake about it. The government’s professed concerns for the poor and those from rural areas notwithstanding, reversing the current policy would adversely and disproportionately impact them. The rich and those in the cities have a ready escape; the rich through private English classes, urban children from the already high levels of English in their community.
The idiocy of the new move is best illustrated by this one startling example. In 2012 when the new plan will be implemented, students in Form IV will be taught science and mathematics in Malay, after learning the two subjects in English for the past nine years. Then two years later when they will be entering Sixth Form or the Matriculation stream, they will again have to revert to English.
.Pupils in the vernacular schools would have it worse. They would learn the two subjects in their mother tongue during their primary school years, then switch to Malay for the next five while in secondary school, and then switch again, this time to English, in Sixth Form and university!
It is a great policy in the short run - everyone will pass their secondary school and every students will have a Form Five certificate.
National literacy will be 100% - every Education Minister’s goal.
In the long term, when a majority of students stumbled at Form 6, what more universities - we will then have a nation of mostly Form Five leavers. Let’s just hope these future students will have that rare spirit and willingness to work extremely hard to overcome this.
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