Education is an issue that is above party politics. This is the long-held belief of Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak who last week reminded us of his commitment to this principle by praising the Government of Kelantan for recording the second best results nationwide in the Ujian Pencapaian Sekolah Rendah (UPSR) during 2012. By being so magnanimous to a PAS-controlled state, weeks out from an election, Najib has again proven how serious he is about the future of our children.
The Federal Government’s commitment to education on which it will be judged by voters at GE13 is contained in the landmark 2012 National Education Blueprint (NEB), arguably the most important vision for the future to be unveiled in the past year. It seeks to transform education not just during the next parliamentary term, but midway into the next decade and along the way gives parents a far greater say in what their children’s learning process.
The positive reception the NEB received continues to trouble Pakatan Rakyat, which has alternately damned the report and then praised it by begging to be part of the process of overhauling our school system. That was the most pertinent thing DAP’s Tony Pua could come up with after he read it while PKR’s Nurul Izzah Anwar could only remark that the Government was only doing what it should be doing. If you were expecting high concepts from Pakatan on this issue, you were wasting your time.
Faced with an inability to engage the Government on this issue or, lest we forget, come up with a detailed alternate vision, the Opposition has tried another tack – trying to score points by exploiting education and racial divisions in a single, cynical action.
In vernacular schools, it believes it can harness and inflame the fears of the Chinese and Indian communities for its own benefit. It claims Barisan Nasional has a secret policy to close Chinese vernacular schools, a theory only contradicted by the fact that new Chinese schools opened last year. It has also sought to claim that our school education standards are plummeting, a claim undone by the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitive Index that ranks the quality of our education system at number 14 out of 142 countries – ahead of the United Kingdom, Germany and the USA.
Pakatan Rakyat has even claimed that 60 Chinese independent schools are threatened by being left out of the national school examination process, yet another claim to be flatly contradicted by Najib’s commitment to their future. Last year the PM, whose son learned Mandarin at school, promised these independent schools will stay within the curriculum.
In other words, every attempt by Pakatan Rakyat to exploit education as an issue that might possibly work for them at GE13 has been thwarted by the facts and the proactive stance of the Government. Najib and his Education Minister Tan Muhyiddin Mohd Yassin have left no doubt about who is setting the education agenda ahead of the election.
Now yet another Government initiative is reminding us that in BN, the futures of our children are safe regardless of the language in which they are educated.
Muhyiddin has Monday pledged to boost support for Indian and Chinese vernacular schools in 2014. His pledge was fittingly made during a Thaipusam celebration at the Batu Caves. It was a promise that was met with rousing applause given that Malaysian’s of Indian origin have felt estranged from the education debate normally dominated by Malay and Chinese interests.
Muhyiddin said this year the Government will introduce into the Dewan Rakyat a mini-budget to benefit national-type Tamil (SJKTs) and Chinese (SJKCs) schools on top of the RM584,382,340 ploughed into SJKTs in and the RM660,346,311 last year.
“The government’s commitment is to see that with all the aid given, the quality of education at SJKTs will improve, thus bring about a quantum leap in the education standard in the country,” he said.
The Government’s commitment to multi-language learning will surprise only those who have been distracted by Pakatan Rakyat’s negativity about 1Malaysia. Because if you spend just a few minutes on the 1Malaysia site you will see that vernacular education is utterly consistent with the PM’s desire to get the best out of all young Malaysian’s regardless of race, religion or their mother tongue.
Just how big a role this issue plays in the GE13 election campaigns of all parties depends not on the statements made by the candidates, but on what the parties commit to print. In other words, their published policies. Pakatan Rakyat needs to come up with some quick smart if they are to be taken seriously on this vital issue. Until then, the Government will be happy to be judged on what it has achieved so far, and the vision it has laid out for the future.