inferiority complex thy suffer…

More so often, we were enquired a question of why study oveseas when local syllabus also provide the same international standard quality, if not better.
Thats where they all got it wrong , dont you think?  Read along now,

I was looking forward to the tabling of the RMK 9 last two weeks for several reasons.Those who are privy of the plan warned of a few weaknesses, so i wanted to look for those. More importantly, the session was to be televised live from Parliament. i mean , how often do we get to watch parliament live? Exactly.Never.

But i had got so drowsy, i only managed to catch the PM ’s opening words and a little of the closing speech when i finally woke up. Partly because of the expected thunderous standing ovation.So much for watching Parrliament live.
Soon enough, the Opposition started to voice their grievance and the station chanelled the telecast back to the studio

Turning instead to newspapers and the 8.00 o’clock news, i was thrilled to discover the government had given education top priority.( a federal univesity in Kelantan and Terengganu, is this bye bye   to dominant kelantanese  clicques?).That was enough for me to ignore the forewarning of the Plan’s weaknesses-for now.

There has always been much talk about elevating educational standards, but perhaps we have realised that our goals cannot materialise out of talk alone.For any meaningfull progress in the quality of our higher  education there has to be a strong and a collective will and a big budget.
The RMK-9 seems to reflect this very well.

Some may argue that we have already made siginficant progress with the mushrooming of private and polytechnic colleges. Perhaps those who argue thus should be reminded that  quality is the issue here, not quantity.
    With the  exception of a few colleges and malaysian-based univesities,the quality of  education in our private learning remains, um, quite suspect.The same can be said about a few state-owned colleges. The RMK-9 however focused more on our public universities, specifically to improve the training and teaching force.  This is to ensure that our public institutions  are on par with the private ones,many of which offer fairly good overseas degrees locally.

Okay, sounds like a good Plan. But lets do a quick reality check:

Firstly, the PhD holders that are expected to form 75% of academic staff in our public univesities by 2015 must receive salaries meaningful enough to keep them in academe.In fact, considering that their PhD’s also be highly marketable elsewhere in the wold, they should be paid well enough to even want to stay in the country.

Our campuses environment will also have to be conducive for our future quality teachers.There is no point of sending folks oveseas for their PhD only to return to poor campuses libraries where they cannot find materials.

More importantly, the lectures must be given space to discuss issues openly without inhibitions or being considered seditious.I am going to be unpopular by saying this but the only consolation  might went along like yes, we do discuss them sometimes, but what happens next is its stops mid-way, mid-session,  or any other vocabulary i can see fits, for the lectures suddenly realised they had toe the invisible line and decided to retreat back, or worse , close the issue off.Academic conservatism is a bane to the development of higher education in Malaysia-as is plagiarism in postgraduate research that is, by the way, immensely rampant in pur public universities.

I am really looking forward to see Malaysia in 2020.

Inspired by The Sun.

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