So i believe that everybody should be convinced that education is the very embodiment of all that is good, the training grounds for the saviours of the needy, the candle for the young to light their path to realise their future, and the vanquisher of all evils right?
It is true as long as the whole concept of education is practiced and carried out in a proper balance between academic excellence and human development. As religions, nations and leaders had strayed from their original path blinded by various side distractions, so did education itself. The education system of today places tremendous emphasis on academic excellence that the basic meaning behind the whole concept of education has been lost.
The students go to school day in and day out only to find themselves in tuition centers later the very same day just to make sure that they do not miss out on what is included in the syllabus that has been released by the Education Ministry. They spend more time at school and in tuition centers than with their family. Their whole aim in their education is to succeed to score fantastic results in their final exams no matter what the cost. This is partly because of the examination orientated system that is practised in this country and partly because of the crumbling societal values.
Gone are the days where neighbours were nice to each other and even give each other food occasionally. These days neighbours do not even know each other. They just get back home and lock the gate and doors behind them, clambering in the safe heaven that they created for themselves which is their house. I say their house is their safe heaven and not their homes because to make a home, you also need strong family ties besides a house. Families today are also not as "family" as it used to be in the good old days. Kids have their own room which they lock themselves in and retreat from the need to interact with their own family. Parents on the other hand are just too busy leveling up in the make or break game called their "career".
The crumbling societal norms has paralyzed the very process of education in which the role of family is completely nullified. Without the values imparted from the family unit itself, discipline has become rampart in schools. Parents blame the teachers for not teaching their children properly without realizing that they themselves were in the wrong when they neglected their own role in the education process of their own children. Parents who are so engrossed in the highly addictive MMRPG (not MMORPG cos its not played online) called "career" are so used to seeing their results in terms of figures that they deem the subjective elements of education unimportant because they cannot be put in to a table of figures and values. The only measurable part of education which is academics assessed by examination performance is thus seen as the only thing to the process of education.
This makes parents push their children to achieve better results in their examinations as they see it as the how well educated their child is. They will continuously push their children to chase and hunt down the most coveted prize for their hardwork academically called an "A". They will not only push for just one of these "A"s. In fact they will would be pleased if their kid brings back a document telling them that their child got a whole load of "A"s. Wanting to make their parents happy, innocent children is thus caught in this endless pursuit of "A"s by going through a regime of endless tuition classes.
Even other forms of measurable success are throughly exploited by these unscrupulous people so that they can show off to their neighbours. This competitive spirit of wanting to out do each other is best embodied by the chinese schools up here in the Northern Region of Malaysia i.e. Chung Ling, Keat Hwa, Jit Sin, Ping Hwa etc etc. Students in these educational institutions, power houses that churn out hordes of Straight As students every major examination without fail, grow up in an environment where helping each other out in studies are almost unheard of and they all look at opportunities to cause their peers results to drop to be the alpha student in the school. These school teachers teach by training the students to memorize whole volumes of revision books word by word and then regurgitating the memorized texts later during the exams. Conditions like these cause the youths sent there to grow up in a dog eat dog world out there and they end up as untruthful, scheming and devious individuals that have retarded creativity and lack of understanding of what they have scored an "A" for and also the meaning of life itself. These institutions are almost like factories mass producing stereotypical Chinese nerds (i.e. good with numbers and low on EQ) by the thousands every year and still parents doom their children in to such an unforgivable spiral down from being a person to a mass produced "product".
I really am not against education because education can help close the gap between the elite class and the lower classes. Education has helped eradicate poverty and freed the poor from the vicious cycle of being oppressed by their employers who subject them to hard labour. Without education, the poor will remain poor and the rich will become richer. But what is being done here is the artificial augmentation of examination results. These unscrupulous education institutions exploit the loop holes in the current education system and produce an end "product" purpose built to excel in the education system in this country without thinking about what happens afterwards. Sure, most of their "products" will end up in professional courses in our universities. But what happens after they graduate? They will bring that unforgivable culture of dog eat dog out to their workplace and make the people around them unhappy to collaborate with them. But this has became an inescapable crisis that this country
has fallen head over heels into. All over the workforce, the professionals are mostly that kind of a "product".
This is no longer a matter of creating opportunity for the poor to climb up the classes. This is the very precursor to the crumbling of social order. Now the riches and authority will fall to people whom were not imparted with societal values from a young age. Women who naturally choose men with higher social status will end up marrying these "products" and thus the normal people (whom i believe are better people than the aforementioned "products") wont get the women. This not only causes the crumble of societal order, it threatens the very process of natural selection itself!! Mankind is at risk here!!
If you do not have passion to do something (e.g. EE engineering or Chemical engineering), just don't do it because everybody else does it. What about young aspiring Malaysians who are talented in those fields but lose out in academic results? The Malaysian government is constantly blaming Singapore and other countries for the brain drain of the country but what about the wasted brains from the ineffectiveness of the education system itself?
As an example to put into context what i am saying all this while, this is an article that i took a picture of from The Star. This nerd has claimed the gold prize in Program NILAM by "reading" 558 books in 15 months. Thats 37.2 books per month!! Thats more than a book a day!! Which normal human does it? I would instantly distance myself from such such a lifeless kiasu knowing that he might sell me off for his own gains. All in all this skewered education is steering the countries youth in to a collision course with devastating effects that will be felt for generations to come unless something drastic is done to stem this problem at the root.
