Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.
Salam sejahtera dan salam penuh hormat kepada Yang Berhormat Mulia, Menteri Pendidikan Malaysia, Dr. Maszlee Malik .
————-
Dear Honorable Minister,
It is heart-warming to see how you can sit on the children’s chair and look into their eyes. We feel you are looking through our hearts as students, teachers and Malaysian civilians alike. You make the children the primary focus instead of them being pointlessly forced to stand in line under the hot sun to salute you as the VVIP. You make the child feel like they matter too, and that to us shows what Education for Malaysian can and should be all about.
There is no doubt you have a challenging time, carrying loads of expectations to be exact and do no wrong. But we know that you take the time to look at some of the children’s bags when you visited the schools. You know they are carrying rocks on their back climbing the staircase. We will not talk about the figures you mentioned. We want to tell you to look through the books and see how many pages are meaningful learning for the children’s cognitive and academic development. How many pages actually will help them build the foundation of their future learning. Six years of childhood life is too long to be wasted in meaningless pages.
Doing It Our Way
What we are saying is, let us replace the massive rocks inside the bag with love of learning. Learning happens with games, with interactions, with observations, with searching, with imagining, with just so many more actions than just opening textbooks and writing. The Report Card? Let us evaluate efforts as attainments rather than just collecting marks to label a child’s potentials.
We don’t need to bring in Taiwan, Finland, China, Japan or any country to our national school here. They may be used as a benchmark or inspiration but let us remind you about our own. Let us believe in ourselves for our own national curriculum. Just take the model of a Malaysian Kampung Boy who are curious and eager, religious yet best friends with all races, bring joy in learning, able to give a Pantun at his fingertips, however, “Speaking London” fluently. The kind of life like this Kampung Boy generation regardless of races is lost in plain sight now. They are actually among the good successful leaders that we have now. This is the model of Education that should be for Malaysia. The education that we have lost due to so many changes we have made along the way to achieve a likeness to other than our own. We don’t have to look too far to other countries, we just have to trace it back and find it in our own backyard.
Our Children, Our Future
Being the pioneer in Early Childhood education practitioner and provider for almost 20 years, and having gone through the roller-coaster of changes in the Malaysian education system, we must say that we need most is very simple. We need the young children to be looked into their eyes. Like you did. To know that they matter. That their teachers’ matter. That the support for the preschools is across the board, whether private or government, they all need your help. Believe it or not, no matter how big the preschool brand you see from the outside, most of them don’t strive to stand tall because of the business. They keep rising because of their mission for the nation. They are carrying the heavy loads of Education for Malaysia.
So seeing you sitting on that chair next to our children, indeed means a lot for us, for our children to weave their dream for the future.
———-
Dengan rendah diri,
Salam penuh hormat.