Education Hullaballoo ver 9.0

I originally wanted to blog about my recent Singapore trip, and my impressions. I also wanted to top it off with a mini review of a delightful UK film I saw called Shaun of The Dead. However when I got back home little did I realise the extent of the hue and cry caused by the latest round of university intakes.

I won't even attempt to do a write up, many of the other more established bloggers have done so, and exceedingly well at that. I am terribly sorry for those students out there who have given their all only to be given an arbitrary reason for being shunted into an obscure faculty or departmental course. It is a huge blow, and no doubt many of you are disillusioned and disoriented. I am also sorry that the process of choosing your potential course is so difficult not because it IS, but because you lack any trained (and caring) help. My brother faced it, and I think so have you. You received the forms with scant clue as to how to fill them in, much less any warning that ONE minor slip will shunt you out of your chosen course to something no-one's heard of. You hear rumours of a lelong system, where the uni high-ups decide what to do with the scores of students who supposedly do not make the grade (or the quota, perhaps?) Other than the UPU handbook that arrived in the post, you have to make do with common sense and frequent calls to friends or older relatives. Some of you are lucky because you actually know someone familiar with the system. Other times you just trust in God and fill those eight choices in, knowing full well whatever happens it's still going to be YOUR fault.

There are no excuses to be made. None at all. As someone who works in the system, whom some of you will see this coming June (if you come to classes that is), I have to say I have none of the answers. This has been going on since I was a student, and no one has the faintest idea why or how, or perhaps no one dares say that they do.

A brain drain is going on, and even yours truly can't really escape its temptation. As noted in SuaraMalaysia, a unified examination system is perhaps what we need to eliminate cried of favouritism, cronyism and the like. That silly little crutch the malays are so comfortable with needs to be chucked in the trash (I'm Malay by the way, before anyone decides I'm a racist pig). You want to see why? Come to the other side and see what it has done for your children. Dependent, scared, inert. This is my raw material, and you expect me to mold them into gold?

This is not my job. Spoonfeeding is not my job either. Neither is repairing the damage caused by a decades-long disintegration of learning values and the tidak apa attitude.

As Fooji notes, good exam results don't necessarily make a good student. Anyone can cram a textbook into their head. But how many students actually come into the system hoping for more than just a good GPA? From where I'm standing, not many. Of course, I don't blame it all on the students, since the system has been effectively killing off any creativity they may have had.

There needs to be a revamp, and we can't do it if the administrators are the same people who were there 30 years ago. Until we abolish decades of brainwashing and patronage, there will be other cries of foul play and calls for transparency. Ultimately the damage CAN be undone, only if you want to. Shake off that inferiority complex and the secondary school mindset. Throw away that "government will always help us" motto you've been fed. There is every chance to do well as a student AND a person in university, and it's all up to you, no matter what they did to your UPU forms.

I await the intake with bated breath. See some of you in June.