MALAYSIA - Interestingly, both Singapore and Malaysia chose to announce changes to the primary school education system on the same day.

But what I find incomprehensible is that Malaysia opted to re-format their UPSR, the primary school leaving exam, to include school-based assessments, while Singapore did not.

Singapore instead chose to re-focus and re-balance its curriculum to incorporate more life skills, to aim for single-session schools and to have an all-graduate primary teaching force by 2015 (currently 55% and 91% of primary and secondary school teachers respectively are graduates). But there is no mention of any changes to their PSLE, the equivalent of our UPSR.

Why I find this incongruous is that Singapore is infinitely more capable to implement changes to the examination format. They have the skilled teachers, the relative homogeneity of students and a culture that champions systematic approach, transparency and objectivity. Malaysia does not have any of these - but it has the derring-do (some may call it foolhardiness).

I am not saying this is not the direction to go - it is good to have a less exam-oriented education system and eventually we should get there with more school-based assessments. But we (referring to Malaysia) are not ready.

Many have raised doubts on the feasibility of this latest suggestion and I dare not think how many U-turns this new policy will have before we see anything happening.

However, if you were to ask me, I would say, don't do anything to the UPSR format... yet. Malaysia is just not ready to do anything fancy with the education system. It cannot think it can leapfrog ahead of others. Things are not so simple. Get the basics right first.

First things first, can we have more high calibre teachers?

Secondly, can we re-look at the curriculum and eliminate facts-based learning and incorporate more thinking-based learning?

Err.. by the way, are we going ahead with the teaching of Math and Science in English or are we reverting to Bahasa Malaysia?

Robynhood

This article was taken from The Star Blogs, a section of one of Malaysia's leading dailies, The Star.