The Unbearable Lightness of Being Shitty

“Blah blah blah university has campuses everywhere! Enroll now and you might get a chance to win one of the 20 laptops to be given away!…” That was how I understood the radio ad’s message. Goodness me, how can they promote education like grilled chicken wings in Jalan Alor? “Buy two sticks, get one free!” The way these kinds of ads from colleges/universities proliferate in mass media is one of the telltale signs of a vital flaw in Malaysia’s educational system. I thought that the Philippines is a haven for diploma mills (not counting the one-stop diploma shops along Recto Avenue), but I guess I am wrong!  The Philippines may have its share of diploma mills, but at least the schools advertise about great facilities, reputable faculty and competitive curricula, and not freebies.

I can’t help comparing the educational system of Malaysia with the Philippines. I’ve had discussions about this with my Malaysian friends and they really didn’t take my comments positively. It’s understandable for them to react negatively because of a sense of blind patriotism or bruised egos. Maybe they’re thinking how can a poor nation which is infamous for exporting domestic helpers and prostitutes have a better educational system than a country flourishing to become a first-world nation in the near future?

It is quite disappointing to read the terrible grammar of correspondences from directors or senior managers of big companies. It’s quite disheartening to hear them bastardize the basics of subject-verb agreement. It is quite appalling to see a resume from a 10-year Senior Director written in a slum-book format. Having a decent command of written and spoken English may not be everyone’s key to success, but it is a potent tool to chisel your way through a globally competitive environment. The hard-core advocates of the Malay language are using patriotism as a defense for maintaining Bahasa Melayu (BM) as the language for teaching. I have nothing against BM since my mother tongue, Tagalog, is rooted in this language, but how can you ever use BM to communicate with your foreign investors? BM and Tagalog are beautiful languages but these won’t ever become universal languages.

Do you ever wonder why even the middle-class families in Malaysia send their children to Australia or the UK for education? Do you ever wonder why Filipinos, despite being educated totally in the Philippines, are being dragged by employers from the USA, Australia, Canada, the UK and the Middle East nations?

I’m not generalizing that education in the Philippines is a lot better, but there are some areas in which the Malaysian government should definitely start to improve. Malaysia has enough surplus money to allocate for education; unlike in the Philippines wherein the education budget is slashed every year for higher Pork Barrels for the politicians. Malaysia has all the means, so why can’t they bring home the bacon in education? (The bacon is Halal Chicken, by the way.)