USM Autonomy

This is pretty significant news for Higher Education in Malaysia. USM will soon introduce its own entrance exams. I'll post the full article below (for posterity) and then comment on the other side.

PENANG: USM will begin direct open intake beginning May this year instead of going through the UPU (Unit Pusat Universiti).

USM vice chancellor Tan Sri Professor Dato' Dr Dzulkifli Abdul Razak said the measure would be implemented beginning the new intake for this year and next year. Students can apply through the university's website at www.usm.my.

He said so far 13,000 applications had been received while the university would take in only about 3,500 students.

Dzulkifli pointed out that USM would select only students that meet the requirements, one of which would be the "admission tests."

The direct intake policy will be a departure from the conventional UPU allocation system, and this should bring about far-fetching effects on tertiary institutions in this country.

Dzulkifli said students used to be admitted into USM through UPU allocation, but after receiving the APEX (Accelerated Programme for Excellence) status, the university had the privilege of conducting direct intake of students.

He said the university would use the admission tests to determine the allocation of courses for students, adding that the tests would be independently carried out by a professsional team with the Examinations Board, and USM would not have a hand in the tests.

He said such tests had never been carried out elsewhere in the country before, and USM would be the first to conduct the tests. The list of students failing the admission tests would be handed back to UPU for allocation to other universities.

USM's intake procedures are expected to be completed by early May.

USM would not have been able to do this without being given the status of an Apex University (the only one in Malaysia so far). It has been given a lot of autonomy by MOHE as a result. And the progressive VC at USM, Dr. Dzulkifli Abdul Razak is making full use of it to make sure that only really good students get into USM. There will also be a smaller intake commensurate with the decision to be more selective. Hopefully there will be little political fallout from this decision. (I can imagine that some quarters may be tempted to protest) I'm hoping that these people will see USM as an 'experiment' and basically leave it alone. And if USM succeeds, other universities may want to follow. Then, the protest voices may get louder.

I wish VC Dr. Dzul and his team at USM all the best. I hope that they will succeed in their endeavor to raise the bar at USM. For all our sakes.

UM's comparative advantage

Lest I be accused of always bashing UM, here's a bit of good news concerning the oldest university in our young country. "Singapore’s youngest private university, SIM University (UniSIM), is cooperating with Universiti Malaya (UM) to expand the use of Bahasa Malaysia at the international level through sharing of expertise, syllabus and training. UniSIM president Prof Cheong Hee Kiat said the two institutions hoped to realise the objective through such cooperation forged for UniSIM’s Bachelor in Malay Language and Literature programme." Good to see UM's comparative advantage put to good use abroad. Perhaps this can be replicated in other places e.g. Thailand or China?

Not enough classrooms

This looks like a bad joke at first. "Insufficient classrooms has left 553 Form One students here in a limbo." Apparently due to bad planning. So these 553 Form One students don't have a school to go to. Maybe they should head to the nearest cybercafe instead. Sabah really gets the short end of the stick. I remember reading somewhere that a school near KK had a 100% failure rate for the UPSR or PMR exams. Now kids in Sabah don't have classrooms to go to!

MB's kid in a Chinese primary school

Apparently, the MB of Perlis sends his children to a Chinese primary school. This is the 4th child in his family to attend a Chinese primary school. Does he know something which others don't know or maybe don't want to admit that they know? You guys be the judge.

Class size or teaching?

I've found that one of the most controversial debates when it comes to education, especially in developed countries, is what is the best way to spend the scarce money we have on education. The debate often boils down to a choice between two things: smaller classes, or better teachers.

Personally, I've always felt it's obvious that we should pay teachers better, especially in Malaysia. There is no reason to hold teachers to a rigid pay scale based on seniority, let alone the pay scale of the civil service. Teachers perform a much more important job than civil servants, and I daresay deal with a lot more stress. It only makes sense to pay them more, and especially to pay the outstanding teachers more.

The argument for smaller class sizes seems rather vague to me, and it's predicated essentially on the notion that it's hard for good teachers to pay attention to more than 20 pupils at a time. While I think there is probably room to rethink the traditional classroom dynamics of one teacher lecturing/supervising a classroom of pupils, I think that diminishing marginal returns kick in pretty quickly past the point of 30 pupils. While I don't have much data, from my personal experiences, the rowdiest classrooms have been those of 35 or more, with not much difference below that, especially not below 30 students.

Recently my attention was drawn to a University of Auckland study, which claims to have brought together 50,000 different studies and looks at a total of 83 million pupils around the world. The study's conclusion is that class size is not very important, and that the quality of teaching easily outstrips class size in terms of importance. The professor who authored the study is John Hattie, who I have not heard of before. He seems to have published quite a bit on this subject, but I was unable to turn up much about this latest study of his, so it is worth taking with a grain of salt.

Nevertheless, I think it's still a question worth asking: what matters more, teaching quality or class size? Obviously Malaysians have some other things to worry about, such as our horrible exam system, but there already seems to be a general consensus that we need to raise the standards of our exams, and try to orient them away from general memorisation of facts. There is, however, nothing close to a consensus on the question I'm raising.

What do you think? Should we spend more money on hiring good teachers to teach to classrooms of 30 or 40, or should we spend more money to hire the same quality of teachers but with smaller classrooms of 20 to 30?

University of Texas at Dallas

UT Dallas is not a household name in Malaysia. Indeed, it's not even a household name in the United States. Most people would associate UT (University of Texas) with its flagship campus in Austin, Texas. (One of my favorite cities in the US, I may add) I recently met an Indian student from UT Dallas who enlightened me about how important a research university UT Dallas actually is. I think UT Dallas holds interesting lessons for our own public universities in Malaysia.

According to Wikipedia, UT Dallas is actually the largest research university within the UT system, even larger than UT at Austin. But it's not that surprising given that UT Dallas started out as a research arm of Texas Instruments (TI), probably one of the most innovative large corporations in the US. UT Dallas started giving out graduate degrees before conferring undergrad degrees which might explain why the academic standards there are relatively high, especially for a state school that is not named Michigan or Berkeley.

There are strong collaborative roots between TI and UTD. This is best exemplified by the 3 billion dollar fab plant built by TI in 2004 on the campus grounds of UTD accompanied by a $85-million Natural Science and Engineering Research Building that was also built on the UTD campus by UTD. It seems that UTD has a number of serious looking research centers. And I'm guessing that these centers are not just website 'for show', unlike some of the research centers associated with certain public universities in Malaysia which also have websites associated with them but with far less research activity (not all of course, but a fair number).

I'm sure that there is good research being done in parts of our public university system which many of us are not aware of. But this kind of research environment takes years to create and requires a lot of funding, especially when it comes to the sciences and engineering. And it's not just about throwing money at a certain venture, which the Malaysian government and some VCs may be keen to 'promote'. It's got a lot to do with putting in the right people and also inculcating the right mentality and research culture.

For example, I was told by a friend that it is very risky to share your uncompleted research with colleagues in our public universities because it is very likely that your ideas or work in progress may be 'stolen' by others. Not the kind of culture that promotes research, to say the least.

The UTD example shows that you need a combination of factors to create an up and coming research university - a combination of private and public funding, a combination of public and private know-how, high intellectual standards, a long gestation in creating a culture of research, progressive leadership at the management level, just to name a few.

I think that among all of our public universities, USM actually has the best shot of making a jump into the league of respectable universities in Asia. They have a very progressive VC who has reached out to create some of the things discussed in this blog and in this post - a good research culture, encouraging public-private cooperation, high intellectual standards that is exemplified partly by transparent promotion exercises (by Malaysian standards anyways) and so on. It was no mistake that it was USM rather than UKM or UM that was awarded with the status of the 'Apex' university. I would encourage our VCs to try to get some of these basics right first rather than to aim for the more 'shallow' goal of getting back among the top 200 universities in the THES rankings or to produce the first Nobel prize winner by 2050. Just look at UTD. Nobody outside the US has heard of it. But the people who are involved in certain research areas most certainly are aware of this up and coming research university.

A trip to the bookstore

A little departure from the regular post. It is inspired by a trip I recently took to the bookstore with 4 refugee kids who recently migrated to the US from a Southeast Asian country (Not Malaysia!) because their tribe was being persecuted by the central government in their country. My wife and I were giving some of them Math tuition for about a year before we had to stop because of my thesis commitments. We bought each of the eight kids in the family a Barnes and Nobles gift card and I brought 4 of them (space constraints in the car) to a Barnes bookstore on Monday so that they could use their giftcards to buy some books. It was a learning experience, for them as well as for me.

The oldest kid in the car was a boy, 15. The girls were aged 8, 10 and 13. I thought I could just leave them to roam about the bookstore by themselves to pick and choose the books which they would like to purchase. But I thought wrong.

When I was young, my parents used to dump me in a bookstore and let me wander around there for hours while they did their shopping. I would pick and choose the books I liked. These would include Enid Blyton books (moving from Brier Rabbit to Famous Five as I got older), Time Machine, Choose your own Adventure, Lone Wolf, Dragonlance, etc... You get the picture. I never needed anyone to help me choose books.

I was wrong in making the same assumption with regard to the kids I brought to Barnes (temporarily my adopted children, I like to think). They had never been in a bookstore of this size before though they had been in libraries. More importantly, they had never bought a book for themselves. Not only did they have to pick and choose a book (or two) for themselves, they also had to figure out how much they were willing to spend on each book.

(Aside note: Gift cards are a great thing to teach kids how to budget. Instead of buying books for your kids and friend's kids, get them gift cards instead)

In the end I had to help 3 of the 4 kids pick out a book each. One picked a book on anatomy (I'm convinced that she will be a doctor when she grows up), another picked a book on dogs and another a book about fairy tales.

They had some money left over on their cards which I'm hoping they will use either on their own or when I bring them there next. Maybe the other 4 kids.

The larger lesson I learned which I think may apply to Malaysia is that their situation may not be so different from that of some Malaysian kids from some of the rural and semi-rural areas who are also from financially disadvantaged backgrounds (high correlation there). I think if you were to bring some of them (not all of course, I'm generalizing) to a place like Borders or Books Kino, they may find it to be an equally intimidating experience. I'm just guessing.

I'm not sure that it would be necessarily helpful to expose some of the rural kids to these kinds of bookstores. Perhaps a better way would be to bring mobile libraries to some of these rural areas. And have reading programs in these schools which will perk up their interest in reading books, in whatever language. For this, you really need good teachers who are skillful enough to excite kids about reading. Not something easy to do. Getting the books to the kids is only part of the step. Having a nurturing home and school environment are equally if not more important.

Learning English: Serious Business

I just read an interesting article in The New Yorker about English instruction in China which I thought I'd share with you. The article's focus is on Li Yang (李阳), who claims to have taught 20 million people how to speak English, and holds English classes in stadiums. It's a fascinating read.

The part I personally found most interesting, though, was this paragraph, which I think really gives us an insight into how big a deal learning English has become for Chinese:

China has been in the grip of "English fever," as the phenomenon is known in Chinese, for more than a decade. A vast national appetite has elevated English to something more than a language: it is not simply a tool but a defining measure of life’s potential. China today is divided by class, opportunity, and power, but one of its few unifying beliefs—something shared by waiters, politicians, intellectuals, tycoons—is the power of English. Every college freshman must meet a minimal level of English comprehension, and it’s the only foreign language tested. English has become an ideology, a force strong enough to remake your résumé, attract a spouse, or catapult you out of a village. Linguists estimate the number of Chinese now studying or speaking English at between two hundred million and three hundred and fifty million, a figure that’s on the order of the population of the United States. English private schools, study gadgets, and high-priced tutors vie for pieces of that market. The largest English school system, New Oriental, is traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

It's hard to say whether Li Yang himself is a quack or a pedagogical genius, so I won't pass judgement on his methods. I do think it's rather strange and extremely interesting how excited (though obsessed might be a better word) the Chinese seem about learning English.

One thing I have pointed out before in the comments of another post on this blog is that it seems to me we in Malaysia have a bimodal distribution of English proficiency. We have one huge population of Malaysians whose English skills are poor to non-existent, and a smaller but sizable population whose English skills are very good. (I help answer questions from international students for my university's admissions office, and the quality of English in most emails - yes, even those from China - is abysmal compared to the English in emails we get from Malaysian applicants.)

To confirm if my initial impressions were right, I looked up the number of English speakers in Malaysia (Wikipedia makes it easy by compiling international figures from a number of sources). Apparently, Malaysia is 14th in the world when it comes to the number of people who speak English as a first language (such as myself), with about 380,000 native English speakers. We are 19th overall when it comes to total population of English speakers, with another 7 million Malaysians who can speak English as a second language. There are about 27.5 million Malaysians, so only about 25% of us can speak English, with the rest largely cut off from the world of opportunities English can open.

Our educational policy should try to cater to these vast differences instead of covering them up and adopting a one-size-fits-all philosophy. To me, it makes no sense to assume a level of English that most Malaysians clearly don't have, and neither does it make sense to hold back those Malaysians who speak English well just because most cannot speak English.

The main reason teaching English in science and maths was a foolish idea in the first place is that most of our schools fail at preparing students to use English properly, and that most of our teaching institutions fail at preparing teachers to use English properly. Many students probably cannot understand enough English to follow science and maths lessons given in English, and most teachers probably don't have good enough English to give those lessons. It is crazy to argue that the policy of teaching science and maths in English can bring up the overall quality of English when you have teachers with poor English often teaching pupils with poor English.

At the same time, it is hard to argue that we should permanently confine English to English classes; especially at the higher levels, it is probably more useful for students to familiarise themselves with English terminology at an early stage. The proper thing to do is neither to permanently roll back the policy nor to pretend that it is working; the right thing is to improve the quality of our English instruction, and give schools a choice about using English and other languages in the classroom so that the schools can adapt to changing circumstances.

Chinese educationists (the ones in China, not here) take English seriously enough to require a strict minimum standard of English for university entrance. How seriously do we take English? We're so lackadaisical about it that we let the standards for SPM English fall to the point that on our SPM certificates, we give a separate grade for papers marked according to GCE O-Level standards, because we all know an A for SPM English is mostly meaningless. How can we hope to introduce let alone expand the use of English in our school system when we are so complacent about learning English?

For the vast majority of Malaysians, the focus must be on improving the quality of English instruction, and allowing schools to opt to use the mother tongue in the classroom. This way, as the schools and parents become more confident in the conditions required for a successful transition to English instruction, schools will naturally switch over. On the other hand, if the government fails in fixing the core problem of learning English, the schools can just keep doing their own thing.

For the minority, we should likewise allow more extensive use of English if the schools find it desirable or necessary. There is no reason to hamper the promotion of advanced English skills amongst those who have already learned some English. We should encourage them to find schools where they can practice their English and improve it, instead of forcing all schools to conform to a uniform policy of either all-English or all-mother tongue.

Some proponents of teaching in English might object because they believe parents and schools will be too short-sighted to recognise the benefits of English. I think that just calls for improving awareness about the importance of English; I don't see the need to force a decision on anyone. There's no use forcing students to learn in English when they barely understand the language; the important thing is to help them learn English first.

If the schools or parents want to block English learning, that's a different story; the government should impose rigorous standards for English instruction. English, like Malay, should be a mandatory subject which all SPM, PMR and UPSR candidates must pass; the grading standards should also be tightened. That's the very least the government could do if it wants to improve the standard of English.

Ultimately, we need to take English seriously. It's an important language to learn, and one few people can do without. China has looked to English as a source of empowerment; we look at English and become complacent. There is no quick fix to the problem of English in Malaysia, but neither can we ignore the problem and hope it goes away. The government needs to recognise that most schools are not ready to teach science and maths in English, and implement a system which will facilitate a gradual transition based on improving standards of English.

Letting schools decide for themselves will ultimately be the best compromise. We cannot ignore the 80% of the country which can hardly speak English, nor can we ignore the 20% which speak it very well; the only solution must be to let both sides decide for themselves which language to use in their local communities. The ultimate objective should be to improve the quality of English among those 80% so that eventually they will be ready to use English in subjects like science and maths.

We have to treat the problem as a serious matter, instead of airily dismissing it, as both the Education Ministry and mother tongue education proponents often seem to do. We can neither keep the status quo by forcing the use of English in science and maths, which assumes we know more English than we really do, nor can we permanently return to the old status quo ante of mother tongue education, which assumes we don't really need to know much English. The situation calls for new and bold measures to uplift the quality of English across the board.

Majority of PMR Science Answers in English

Headline in the Star today - 51.2% of candidates chose English and English only to answer their PMR Science exam compared with 30.8% who answer in Malay and 18% who used a combination of the two. In the previous year, only 21.5% used English and only English. This is a pretty big jump. I would have liked to see the breakdown for Math as well to see if there was a similar jump. Perhaps this may be a sign that there will not be a complete reversion to the previous policy of teaching S&M in BM or mother tongue at the primary school level? I suspect that a compromise decision may be made. Either continue teaching S&M in English at the secondary school level or start after Primary 3.

Freedom to Our Schools: Decentralisation and Autonomy

One interesting thing I noticed about the roundtable that the Education Ministry held to discuss the issue of teaching science and maths in English is that they mentioned decentralisation of the school system as a possible solution. In my column for The Malaysian Insider a couple of weeks back, I suggested that we let individual schools decide what languages to use in the classroom. Permitting schools to decide on an individual basis how to operate would let school administrators and educators tailor their approach to the needs of individual communities, and permit greater feedback from communities.

There are naturally some administrative difficulties involved in moving from a highly centralised school system such as ours to a less centralised one, but it is important that we give this issue some thought. Treating students the same wherever they are is not a very reasonable approach, and tying the hands of schools when it comes to responding to local needs is a very bad idea. While full decentralisation is almost certainly impossible, we need to start looking into giving our schools more independence and autonomy.

The Chinese schools are a pretty good example of how independent school governance might work. Because the federal government largely ignores them, the Chinese educationists have become adept at running schools and tailoring them to the needs of different communities. Independent school boards comprising respected figures hold administrators accountable for their performance.

So one way to free our schools would be to give principals a little more independence in structuring their curricula - the Education Ministry would still set some standards and list out the minimum material which must be covered, but principals would be allowed to decide how to cover them - what textbooks to use, and so forth. Instead of being accountable to a civil servant, principals would now be held accountable to elected school boards. While I am not sure how our present administrative framework would deal with this, if there was enough political will to devolve school administration, it would not be terribly difficult to accomplish. The school board idea is merely one possibility - there are others. The important thing is to somehow permit greater diversity in our school system.

How will the schools function? Well, the Education Ministry will still be in charge of setting standards for schools to meet. The SPM and other exams will still remain, but now schools will truly be free to approach different ways of preparing students for them. At the moment, we use almost the same textbooks throughout the country; this is a huge racket for the publishers of the textbooks, which are not very good, as you can tell from how almost any student with some money usually has supplementary books which cover the same material but in more effective ways. Likewise, teachers work more or less the same way throughout the nation, giving more or less the same lectures. If schools had some autonomy in these areas, we would see a more effective approach to teaching and learning, one adapted to the needs of specific students.

If we wanted to take this further, we would allow principals to hire and fire teachers, and maybe even vary the pay of teachers depending on ability. Instead of the Education Ministry maintaining a central pool of teachers which it allocates out to schools Soviet-style, we could let schools pick their own teachers. At the moment, the teaching profession is insulated from market forces, which is quite bad for everyone. Teachers are stuck with lousy pay doing a difficult job; schools can't reward excellent teachers or really get rid of people who have no business teaching. Permitting some freedom in the employment process would benefit everyone, since there is really no reason to be tying the wages of our teachers to the wages of civil servants.

Now, how would we prevent administrators from making bad decisions? After all, many will no doubt grouse, what's keeping a principal from picking lousy textbooks or hiring lousy teachers? This is where having an independent school board as a check comes in. The board should be allowed to overrule the principal's decisions, or potentially even hire and sack the principal. Assuming the board is elected by the community, or even just randomly selected from the parents of students at the school, it will do its best to make decisions for the good of the students and the school. If the board has teeth, the principal will be afraid of its bite, and in turn do the right thing.

The Education Ministry should still have a role to play, of course. But the primary purpose of the Education Ministry should be to facilitate good decision-making, not to impose centralised decisions. The Education Ministry could commission studies of different schools across the country and publish its findings as a list of best practices which schools could adopt or reject depending on suitability. It could publish rankings of schools based on different metrics so everyone would know where their local school stands compared to its peers. The Education Ministry should facilitate the flow of information so that good ideas can spread and bad ideas can be checked. But otherwise, its role in running schools should be limited as much as possible; parents and teachers will always be better judges of the kind of education their pupils need.

The only serious objection I can foresee to this admittedly wide-ranging proposal is that it seems a little too radical. We're far too used to a centralised school system, and this is not good. Why should a school in the mountains be conducting the same science experiments as a school near the beach, when they have acces to different ways of illustrating the same scientific principles? Why should a community of rich English-speaking kids have to teach its children in Malay or Chinese or Tamil, and why should a community of primarily poor Malay speakers have to teach its children in English? A centralised decision-making system treats every school and every student as the same, which is simply not sensible.

My proposal is not very likely to be taken up any time soon by the government, though I hope Tony or one of his colleagues can one day put it forward for serious consideration. But I think the principle behind it is sound: We must reduce the bureaucracy and centralisation choking innovation and adaptation in our school system. And if we can start by just letting schools decide for themselves whether to teach science and maths in English or the pupils' mother tongue, that would be good enough for me.

One retort to the suggestion that we let schools decide which language to use to teach science and maths was that schools would make the obviously wrong decision. This is essentially saying, "We're going to let parents throw their kids' lives away by teaching them in English/their mother tongue!" I don't think that is going to happen. Parents are the best judge of what is best for their children; if that is not so, then we should not be letting parents take care of their children. Make as much information available to parents as possible - bombard them with leaflets about the various pros and cons of English and mother tongue education. But let the parents and schools decide which approach will work best for them. It is clear that one single approach will not work for all.

Seeking Public Feedback: S&M in English

I know that this issue has been flogged to death but I had a thought about this yesterday. Regardless of the outcome, there will be groups that will be unhappy. But one thing which I commend the Ministry of Education for is that they did expend time and resources to seek feedback from different groups. This is a far cry from the way this policy was implemented which was basically a executive decision with little or no debate.

According to a Star report, MOE has held 5 roundtable meetings thus far soliciting feedback from different 'stakeholders' including representatitives from PTAs, NGOs and academics. In addition, MOE also presented some of their internal papers and analysis on the UPSR results to some of these stakeholders which I thought was a progressive way of allowing the stakeholders to evaluate the findings of the MOE and then discuss those findings.

In addition, the MOE was flexible enough to put different proposals on the table.

The proposals are:

> Stick to Mathematics and Science in English;

> Revert to Bahasa Malaysia;

> Let primary schools teach both subjects in the mother tongue and secondary schools use English;

> Let primary schools decide for themselves;

> Mathematics and Science be taught in Bahasa Malaysia and mother tongue for Years One to Three and in English from Year Four onwards;

> A combination of mother tongue in the first three years and a choice of mother tongue or English after that; and

> The two subjects will not be taught in Years One to Three and instead be integrated into other subjects.

Some may criticize the fact that putting these options on the table is just for show that the Ministry has already made up its mind but I do think that there was a serious effort on the part of the MOE officials to incorporate at least some of the feedback they received from the different stakeholders into their thinking process.

Ultimately the decision will probably be influenced by political as much as educational motivations but I think the MOE should be commended for the way they approached this issue. Especially when you consider the manner in which this executive decision was 'imposed' on Malaysians 6 years ago. The Minister, his Deputy and the DG of MOE should be commended for this.

Foreign students - socialising with the locals?

To build on Kian Ming's points about students from Botswana, I thought I would relate my own experience from spending one-and-a-half years at a local college with many foreign students, especially from Botswana.

As I mentioned before, I did my A-Levels in KDU College, an institution that has attracted many foreign students interested in pursuing degrees in law, engineering, and other disciplines. My foreign classmates were mostly from the Maldives, India and Bangladesh, and most of them had no problem integrating with the locals.

At the same time, there were often a lot of students from other countries in other programs - guys from Botswana, Mauritius, places in the Middle East. One thing I observed is that most of the African students kept to themselves in their own cliques, while students from other places mixed with the locals freely.

To some extent this can be attributed to racial attitudes. People from the Indian subcontinent look like locals, and so we probably have an easier time relating to them than we might with someone from the Middle East or Africa. A lot of my friends, especially the girls, were frightened of or otherwise not interested in mixing with African students. So I can see where the Botswana government is coming from when they worry about their students having a hard time integrating into Malaysian society.

But I think the real and main problem is one which Malaysians who study abroad might have noticed themselves: we stick to groups we are familiar with, to people we feel an existing kinship with. In UK universities for example, you often find colonies and cliques of Malaysians and Singaporeans who don't really talk to people outside their group. The experience of being in a foreign country and mixing with different people is largely gone because we climb into our own shells.

The same, I think, has happened with students from Botswana. Because their government sends them over in such big groups, they clump and stick together in their own groups; they feel no need to approach locals and befriend them, and the locals feel intimidated at the thought of entering a large group of people they are completely unfamiliar with. Students who have come over because of their own private initiative, by themselves, don't seem to encounter such problems finding a group of Malaysians to hang out with.

Looking back, one remarkable thing about many of my friends from other countries is how quickly and enjoyably they adapted themselves to Malaysian student life. Many of them mamaked and DOTAed in cybercafes with the Malaysians as if they had been doing this their whole lives; they made the most out of the Malaysian experience. And the cultural exchange went both ways; we learned Mauritian creole and the politics of the Maldives from our international friends. When foreign students mingle with local students, everyone benefits.

Now, I cannot say for sure how justified the complaints of some foreign students like those from Botswana are. Maybe the true reason for their difficulties in adjusting is something besides their social isolation. Without an empirical study it is hard to say. But I can see why students from Botswana would complain about this, and if we want to address this, we must understand the social dynamics international students encounter. Cliquing is prevalent wherever international students are; it even exists to a large extent at Dartmouth in the US, where I am studying. But if we want internationals to make the most out of their studies and stay here, we must figure out a way to integrate them better into the mainstream of student life.

Botswanan students have it hard?

Maybe I was jumping the gun in saying that Malaysia is a good place for international students to come to especially those who are from Muslim majority countries. The Star reported that the Education and Skills Development Minister of Botswana, Jacob Nkate, said that they would be cutting down the number of students sent to Malaysia because they were not acclimatising well to life in Malaysia.

The Minister's decision was influenced partly because of the social issues some of the Botswanan students have encountered while studying in Malaysia. Two of them died after falling from their apartment balconies and another was killed in a road accident. It was reported that the students blamed the hostile environment they encountered in Malaysia that forced many of them to turn to alcoholism and other anti-social behaviour.

This is not the first time I've heard of the challenges faced by foreign students in Malaysia. The ugly head of racism usually rears its head partly because we don't have a long history having foreign students in our universities, especially our private universities and colleges. I'm also guessing that many of these foreign students especially those from Africa also have to deal with racism on the part of shopkeepers, taxi drivers and the like.

This is not to say that Malaysian students going abroad don't face these kinds of challenges. I myself had one or two racist comments thrown at me while I was doing my Masters in Cambridge. But most Malaysians are used to the idea of going overseas to study and many of us have good support systems when we go abroad. Also, a majority of us end up in universities where foreigners comprise a significant proportion of the student population. Many of the professors and lecturers and administrators in these universities are also more used to dealing with foreigners. All these factors help us adjust more easily to life abroad.

My sense is that the onus should fall firstly on the administrative and management staff of our private colleges and universities, where most of the foreign and I'm guessing Botswanan students end up. If they haven't already, they need to set up structures and support systems which can identify and help foreign students who are having problems adjusting to life in Malaysia. In addition, they should 'recruit' their own local students to help these foreign students adjust to academic life in Malaysia. I'm sure that many of these universities and colleges are already doing these things already. But this is a good reminder that these efforts should continue or be stepped up. After all, the management staff are the ones with a more direct incentive to make sure that agencies such as the Botswanan government keeps on sending their students to our private colleges and universities.

Ideally, MOHE might do some coordinating activities to ensure that some of the best practices in terms of dealing with different foreign students can be transferred between the different colleges and universities, both private and public.

Of course, there are limits to how much the university administrators can do. (Remember the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech?) But try they must.

P.S. I know that Botswana is not a Muslim majority country. But the points made here should be applicable to other foreign students who are from Muslims majority countries. Just because they come to a Muslim majority country like Malaysia does not mean that they will not encounter challenges like racism as well as the many temptations to 'let loose', so to speak.

A Little Bit (Lot?) About Me, John Lee

Thanks for the introduction, Kian Ming! I think a lot of you might have stumbled across my personal website, Infernal Ramblings in the past, or perhaps read one of the weekly columns I write for The Malaysian Insider. Although I am of course interested in political affairs, I would just like to emphasise that I remain politically unaffiliated, and that I think a vigorous debate about education in Malaysia should be encouraged, because fewer things can be more important than the future of our country and our people. For my first post, I thought I would introduce my educational background and give you a better idea of where I am coming from, and why I care so much about education.

My parents are both graduate degree-holders, and actually met when they were pursuing their Masters degrees. I was born in Japan while my dad finished his post-doctoral work, and then moved to Singapore, where my father taught at Nanyang Technological University for about six years; two of my siblings were born there. My family moved back to Malaysia when I was six, just before the economic crisis. In 1997, I started primary school at SRJK(C) Damansara, and my youngest sister was born.

Damansara was where my love-hate affair with education probably began. I had not attended kindergarten, so I was probably less prepared than many of my peers for primary school, especially in a Chinese-medium setting. I had been a prolific reader as a child, and had actually read some of my father's old secondary school textbooks by the time I was seven, so it was not for a lack of smarts that I had a hard time. I think I found it difficult to cope with the adjustment, and the new languages - Malay and Chinese - I was being exposed to.

So, halfway through the school year, my parents transferred me to Sekolah Sri Kuala Lumpur, a private school in Subang Jaya. I was not happy there either. Although I did well in my classes, I was picked on by my classmates, and spent most of my free time reading books I borrowed from the well-stocked school library; I would borrow a book during the first recess period, read it between classes, and return it and borrow another during lunch period. Two of my clearest memories from this time are the librarian's frequent shock that I could read books so quickly, and how happy I was every time we had library period on Thursdays. I also remember my intense exposure to Malay during this time - the school enforced a strict policy of speaking in Malay during classes, and so I was forced to pick up the language quickly. Ultimately, because I could not relate well with my mainly upper-class and expatriate classmates, and because my parents could not afford the tuition, I transferred again to a public school, SK Bandar Utama Damansara, at the end of primary two.

Of all the schools I have attended, I can confidently say that SKBUD was the best, without question. I made some of the best friends of my life there, and enjoyed the attention from some of the most dedicated teachers I have ever encountered. The headmistress, Datin Fatimah, ran the school with what some might call an iron fist. Unlike many other SKs, the student body was by and large disciplined, and the school made an effort to treat all students fairly, regardless of race.

I was rather surprised when I left the school and found that other schools stream students into classes based not only on academic performance but also race, and that all delegations for interschool competitions had to be "racially balanced"; in SKBUD, you sunk or swam based on your performance, and nothing else. Our school was never the best on any objective scale; most of our students came from poor families and it was considered a stunning success if more than two classes in any year had a 100% pass rate for all subjects. But looking back, I can easily say that my formative years in SKBUD are what made me the idealist I am today about education, and what made me believe that we can do so much more for our students.

I began my secondary schooling in SMK Tropicana. The Tropicana student body was an odd one; I think there were few students from middle class backgrounds. Most students were either from the low-income Kampung Cempaka, or the very high-income suburbs surrounding the school. The teachers, although very nice people, did not always seem dedicated. A lot of them often seemed to be unavailable because of training, and there was a high turnover rate, with teachers frequently joining and leaving the faculty. The main bright spot of my time at Tropicana was my involvement in scouting; I joined the scout troop there, and enjoyed it thoroughly. But ultimately, my parents transferred me yet again; the roads leading to the school were poorly planned and constantly jammed at rush hour; it was just too stressful to drive me to and from school.

The last school I attended, and the one I am most attached to after SKBUD, was SMK Bandar Utama (3). Unfortunately, it made a rather opposite effect on my perception of education: if SKBUD made me see the promise education holds, SMKBU3 made me see how terrible a school system can be if things do not go the right way. The teachers - again, all really nice people - often seemed uninterested in students and more interested in doing whatever suited them. Teachers often only went through the motions of teaching classes, and I think most of us who understood what was going on only did so because we learned from tuition or the textbooks. More than one teacher remarked to us that they were hardly needed since most of us just went to tuition classes anyway. While I had some good teachers - Puan Rozita made moral education, one of the most stupid and worthless subjects ever, worth our time - I had a lot of horrid ones too. One science teacher marked me down as wrong for citing the white fur of polar bears as an example of adaptation, because it was not the answer given in the book. She left the school soon after, and the temporary teacher who replaced her marked me down for describing white blood cells as part of the immune system, because in her words, "red blood cells protect from sick."

My time at SMKBU3 was also marked by a lot of harebrained schemes that can only be described as petty corruption. The school attempted to force all students into taking additional tuition classes and computer classes, and duly charged parents for this. Only official school tracksuits, socks and labcoats could be worn - again, parents were charged for the privilege, at prices much higher than those outside. The year after I left the school, a minor scandal erupted when some teachers attempted to appropriate funds raised for a charity. Of course, the teachers didn't just abuse parents and charities; students got their share too. That same year, a student hit his head against a pole while playing football after school hours; the impact was such that you could actually see the bone of his skull. Although teachers were still on campus, for some reason (possibly legal issues) they refused to take him to the hospital; a student ended up driving him instead.

To top it all off, I have to say that SMKBU3 was one of the most racially polarised schools I have ever seen. The Chinese-dominated administration and faculty often emphasised Chinese interests and issues; the student body followed suit. My classmates who had attended other SKs for primary school, who were and are not some of the most openminded people in the world, even remarked on how racist many of our Chinese-educated classmates seemed, and often made an effort to distance themselves from them. I did not encounter this when I was in Tropicana, not to the same extent; some of my best friends when I was in form one there had been Chinese-educated, and no such barriers seemed to exist. Meanwhile at SMKBU3, those from other racial backgrounds retaliated; one Malay teacher infamously told her students that non-Malays were hopelessly disloyal and could never be trusted to defend the country. As far as I know, she was never disciplined and the incident was hushed up, because we never heard of the matter again.

Now, these were all reasons why I decided to drop out of school rather than transfer yet again, but the main impetus, really, was this: I had had enough of the system. We hear a lot of complaints about rote learning in our schools; about incompetent or lazy teachers; about racial polarisation; about the lack of emphasis on extracurriculars; about how exam-oriented our schools are; so on and so forth. These are all problems with the system; I do not blame my teachers for the way they have acted because as far as I am concerned, they are products of a school system that does not respect them either. (I always thought it was ridiculous that besides teaching, teachers have to worry about filling out menial paperwork and angry parents, all for an insanely low salary; of course they would rather devote their time to creating other streams of income and avoiding work as much as possible.) I could have transferred to a less horrid school, but to what end? I might have marginally better teachers, possibly more active extracurricular groups to join, but I would be working from the same syllabus and curriculum from within the same system - a system that I saw and still see as horribly broken.

When I was in form three, I decided I wanted out. I did not know where to begin in getting out, though, and neither did my parents. My father knew, however, that American universities rely on the SAT to gauge the abilities of prospective entrants; he suggested I take it. When the results came back, I was near the top percentile in every category. So, we began to look around, and asked local colleges what it would take to accept me for a diploma or pre-university program of some sort; all required the SPM or equivalent. The equivalent, then, was the GCE O-levels. I took seven subjects for my O-levels, and studied by myself for the next four or five months, sitting for the O-levels around the same times as my PMR.

After I got my results back, I registered for the A-levels at KDU College. My experience at KDU was something altogether different, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. As a college student, you have a lot more freedom and independence than you would ever have in form six or secondary school. My lecturers were dedicated and friendly with their students, and although I do have some complaints (I would not recommend KDU as your ideal option), it was a breath of fresh air after all those years in the school system. I finished my A-levels almost two years ago, and left shortly afterwards for Dartmouth College, where I am presently majoring in economics.

There is fortunately not a lot to say about my university life so far, except that I am enjoying it, and that I enjoy the greater freedom the American liberal arts philosophy gives to students. I have taken classes in English, Chinese (my Chinese has a rather pronounced Beijing accent as a result), history, and political science; I even have the option of majoring in any of these subjects, if I really want to. Dartmouth has provided me with financial aid allowing me to attend even though my family cannot afford the high tuition fees and other living costs. This is why I am a strong advocate of American education for anyone interested in pursuing their studies overseas; I think it is something not enough Malaysians consider as a choice.

So, now that we've come to the end of my life story (as far as education is concerned), I hope you have a better idea of why it is I think the way that I do. A lot of the things I have written about education on my own website and in my column for the Malaysian Insider have proven controversial, and that is because I am coming from a rather controversial and unique background. I have explored almost every kind of education possible; I have been to a Chinese school, a private school, an SK, two SMKs, and I have even been homeschooled if you count those four months I spent teaching myself for the O-levels. I have had friends who went to Chinese independent schools, missionary schools, and MRSMs. I believe any and all of these paths are viable ones to take, but at the same time, through my experiences and those of others, I have also found that they all have their imperfections and deep flaws.

My hope is that through dialogue and debate, especially on this blog, we can delve further into the successes and failures of the different educational streams and choices in this country; that we can figure out how to fix what is rotten and retain what is excellent. I believe that at a very fundamental level, our national public school system is failing our students, and that there are ways to fix it; I also believe that at a very fundamental level, many of our alternatives to the public school system have been succeeding, and that there are ways to learn from them in rehabilitating and repairing our public school system.

My future posts will usually not be this long, but I hope you've been able to bear with my recounting of the experiences which have shaped how I see our education system today. Although you and I may (indeed, probably) disagree about the best way to reform our school system, I look forward to having a productive dialogue about the successes and failures of the different streams of education in our country, and how to learn from them.

Welcome JohnLeeMK

There's a new addition to the blogging team here at Education in Malaysia. Tony has been really busy with his responsibilities as an MP and I anticipate that I'll have to restrict my blogging activities as I try to finish up my PhD next year. Also, we thought that it would be good to bring in a fresh perspective. Someone younger and who would look at things from a different angle. The new member of our team is John Lee Ming Keong, a sophomore at Dartmouth. I first met John at a blogger's meeting in Subang Jaya a few years back. This was before he left for the US to start his undergraduate degree. He came across as a precocious and idealistic young man then and his interest in things to do with Malaysia including the education arena has not waned even as he has immersed himself in the US education experience. You can read more about him on his personal blog. I'll leave him to introduce himself on this blog. Welcome JohnLeeMK!