Tuesday February 9, 2010
Let every child have access to quality education
THE Education Ministry is again busy at instituting changes and making experiments yet again of our education system. This time it is about identifying high performing schools. While in itself the idea may not be without its merits, I would like to say it will make our education even more elitist than it already is.
Anyone familiar with basic educational principles would agree that education should, first and foremost, be student-centred. The student is the centre of the whole scheme of things as is outlined in our national educational philosophy.
While not wanting to go into details or polemics, I merely want to observe that in the United States and in most other advanced countries, schools exist with no particular labels. Elitism in education is the practice of concentrating attention on or allocating funding to the best students/schools who rank highest in a particular field.
Harvard, Oxford or Cambridge did not become elitist institutions by simply having been branded and trumpeted as top performing schools but rather by the outstanding performance of their graduated students in later lives.
It is more important to standardise facilities and create less disparity among the national schools. This should be a greater concern for our education planners. More level playing fields with the major thrust in improving the overall quality of education in the country and with the sole intention of producing a better educated society should be our prime concern in line with Vision 2020.
The thrust should be towards having truly quality teachers, teacher education, educational planning, curricula, research, administration and so on.
A nation’s greatest asset is its intellectual resource cultivated through the process of education. So let each and every Malaysian child have access to quality education, period.
Impossible? Perhaps not, but we will never know unless we strive towards such goals. Mere labelling or re-labelling of schools may not be the ultimate answer.
JOE CHELLIAH,
Seremban.
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