"It is embarrassing for Muhyiddin to say that our children receive better education than those in US, UK and Germany"

By Voon Shiak Ni,

PKR National Women vice head

With the flip-flop Malaysian education system, it is embarrassing for Education Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin to claim again that Malaysians cannot deny that the country  has the best education structure .

Muhiddin in his statement yesterday said that Malaysian youngsters are receiving better education than children in the United States, Britain and Germany.

It is  embarrassing even for us to remind him that he has obviously contradicted himself as a year ago he had said that his  ministry needed to seriously assess the mechanisms used by Malaysian schools and that a lot had to be done to improve on the education standing after the education standards was proven poor by the  poor results in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

PISA tested 15-year-olds on  Mathematics, Science and  reading and the results released had shown that Malaysia only ranked 55 out of the 65 countries surveyed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Singapore ranked No. 2 while Vietnam also ranked higher than Malaysia at rank 17 .

Voon Shiak Ni

Muhyiddin can say that Malaysians cannot deny that our country has the best education system but the facts point otherwise and it looks silly for him as our Education Minister to state an obvious lie .

He is to be reminded that the real fact is that he cannot deny that his ministry has been putting forward systems and policies for the past years and after huge funds has been pumped in . The system later failed, and cannot work and discontinued , for example , the teaching  and learning of Mathematics and Science in English (PPSMI) programme which was introduced in 2003 and was scrapped off later in 2012 .

Then another example is the controversial School-Based Assessment (PBS) which was introduced in 2011 and barely lasted three years and the Ministry has to revamp the whole system as it is not feasible and practicable .

Muhyiddin said that a large chunk of national coffers has been put for education and this actually goes to show that our funds is not properly used and the ministry has unwisely expended on education systems and policies which are not properly thought through .

We appeal to Muhyiddin  to stop his denial mode and to seriously look into on how to do a better job for the education system for the sake of better education prospects for our children and to make sure the huge funds allocated under each national budgets is wisely and properly expended .- May 26, 2015