“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” - Malcolm X
Every country has it's own education system. I did my pre-school to high school in America and my degree in Malaysia. I grew up through the American education system so you know we learned about the Standard Measurement system while I think every other country learned the Metric system; this is just one example of many. When I came to Malaysia, I had to get used to this different measurement system. I always knew my height in feet and inches but everyone here shares their height in cm since that's what they learned.
It was really shocking when I was in university to find out that there were a fair amount of students that lacked critical thinking. Not only that but there were a fair amount students not good at writing or speaking English. Their English was kind of broken and their grammar was bad as well. I'm basing this off my experience with group assignments and seeing presentations in the classroom. I believe most of this issues comes from the earlier education where most students mostly memorize content instead of actually learning therefore, they can't really add any critical thinking because they are just copy pasting what they memorized and if it's not in their head they are left stunned.
Anyways today I will be sharing what one thing that I believe can be removed and one thing that can be added to the Malaysian education system to make it better.
Remove
Malaysia should remove the morals class. Apparently, Malaysia has a moral's class and I feel like this is good idea and all but it's a bit of a waste of time to teach to those that are already in secondary/highschool. This should be taught at a younger age maybe in like primary/elementary school.
I've never experienced this subject myself before but I have a younger sister that was always doing the homework for this subject until late at night. When I took a look at the homework it seemed a bit useless in my opinion. She even did complain and cry about it before. I don't think school work should make a student want to cry.
Add
Something that Malaysia can add to their education is to have more diversity of subjects to choose from as electives. If I'm not wrong, if you're in a local school in Malaysia you don't really have any electives. It's just the standard English, math, history, bio and that's a bit bland. It doesn't give a chance for students to find or pursue some other subjects that they might be good at like programming etc.
Conclusion
There's many things that Malaysia needs to do to improve the education system. Unfortunately, I highly doubt it will happen because the government is quite stubborn. It also made me appreciate having my earlier education in America as it did make me feel one step ahead of others when I studied for a degree in Malaysia. The downside though was I was somehow automatically the leader of every group assignment because of that background.
