The political parties don’t fight over whether education is important. They know it is.
— Bill Harris, entrepreneur
Datuk Seri Shafie Apdal’s lamentation on the lack of job opportunities for graduates is not something new.
The growing number of unemployed graduates or graduates having to apply for jobs meant for SPM school leavers is an issue which has been with us for years.
Why? Because our education system sucks.
Last week, the former Sabah chief minister called for intensified efforts to provide employment opportunities for graduates so that they would not have to depend on jobs paying low salaries.
So, who should we blame for this malaise in our education system vis-à-vis the employment market? Surely, the government has to shoulder a huge part of the blame.
An economist has pointed his finger in the right direction. Geoffrey Williams of Malaysia University of Science and Technology (MUST) put the blame on the government for the inability of university graduates to find jobs befitting their education.
It was government policy that created the problem, he said.
Williams told a national news portal that the 10th Malaysia Plan (2011 to 2015) aimed to create 3.3 million jobs by 2020, 68 percent of which would not require a university degree.
“It aimed for 56.3 percent to be low-income and 29.5 percent to be middle-income. So the Malaysia plans have been completely successful in creating meaningless, low-paid, low-value-added, precarious and informal employment for many years,” Williams added.
Isn’t it an irony that the five-year Malaysia Plan, supposedly a development plan, has backtracked our education system instead of moving it forward?
The key fault lies in the politicisation of our education system. A new education minister would want to stamp his mark on the system, even though he or she was never an educator but a mere politician.
I don’t wish to talk about the current education minister, whose name I do not even bother to remember, for I doubt his capability in improving anything at all. Ah, he is also a backdoor minister of an illegitimate government, as far as I’m concerned.
Oh yes, I do remember the “black shoes” fella, the one who served under the Pakatan Harapan government but was unceremoniously asked to leave by then Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad in January last year after serving for only 20 months.
Well, don’t try to be too smart when you are a minister, particularly when everyone around you think you are unfit for the job.
Remember your “Medan Dakwah of Sarawak” statement, Mr Maszlee Malik.
Playing politics is not enough, but also attempting to mix religion with education, is it not, Maszlee? I will not be able to forget you nor your callous acts for a while.
I believe that every time a new education minister is appointed, many of us will be getting the jitters for fear that the new guy will mess up.
A mechanism that will not alter the education system with a quantum leap has to be put in place to ensure continuity and consistency. Why fix what is not broken?
Rightly, there have been calls for the reform of tertiary education that would see improvements in quality as well as in the selection of students so that universities would produce talent for specific, high-level positions.
An educator opined that secondary education should also be reformed so that people could enter the job market without tertiary education.
This meant, he said, that the secondary school curriculum must cover the teaching of professional skills.
Tertiary education should be reserved for scholarly work and preparation for liberal professions, he added.
I think it is very important that we seriously take every opportunity to change direction and move forward from a steady, relative deterioration in our educational standards.
For everyone put in charge of education, they must always bear in mind that it is the future of Malaysians they are responsible for. They have no choice but to excel in such an important portfolio.
Most importantly, education is not something for politicians to quarrel over. Education should be above politics.
We have already messed up education in this country. See how we flip-flopped over the English issue and the teaching of Science and Mathematics.
We were not consistent in our education policies and that was how we went under education-wise. Please, let us learn from the past and stop the politicisation of education.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune.
