IT HAD been awhile since I’d gone out on a meal with old friends, so when I received a text message on my mobile phone on Friday from a friend of more than two decades who wanted to meet over dinner, I jumped at the opportunity.
The only snag with these kinds of invitations is finding a place to meet. Although it’s been almost a year since I moved down to Selangor from Penang, I still dread driving in KL traffic. Most times, I opt for a taxi. And it certainly was no different this time around.
While dinner turned out to be rather disappointing — I guess I was expecting too much from hickory barbecue chicken I was served — the conversation was not. My friend, a retired journalist who seems to write more, and certainly with more passion and venom, now than I remember him writing when he was with the major dailies, was in a reflective mood.
I personally owe him a lot because, as an editor many years ago, he was the first to give me a break in the Malaysian newspaper world by publishing my first article. The article was a critique of the plans by the government then to ‘corporatise’ RTM (Radio Television Malaysia) — the government’s propaganda service which is often deliberately misrepresented as ‘public service’ — and the support given by a local media academic in an apple-polishing article he had published earlier.
Fat lot of good that first article of mine did in the end — twenty years on, such corporatisation of RTM has certainly taken place (without much improvement in content, I would add), the local academic I challenged has gone on to higher, more ‘exciting’ things, and me, I’m left still criticising stupid decisions and actions, and having tasteless chicken for dinner.
Which leads me nicely back to Friday’s dinner. At some point during dinner, we were joined by Gerry. Like many others, he had been following my friend’s writing on the internet and felt that he was too ‘negative’ and was, perhaps, painting too bleak a picture of contemporary Malaysia which, he felt, would leave young Malaysians with a hopeless landscape.
With that, the conversation moved to the education of our young. Gerry planned to enrol his children in a couple of the many private colleges in Malaysia. And as the discussion about public and private education became more heated, memories of my first published newspaper article came rushing back. The only major difference was that RTM (and broadcasting generally) was now being substituted with higher education.
So, for Gerry, while public tertiary education continues to spin out of control in terms of quality because of increasing political interference, the emergence of private institutions of higher education and their proliferation has indeed been a godsend.
In other words, as with the ‘corporatisation’, indeed commercialisation, of broadcasting, market forces –yay! — have intervened in Malaysia’s education environment, thus helping to save the day.
If only it were that simple, I retorted.
There are clearly problems with this ‘the-market-is-the-saviour-of-education’ belief.
Disgusted with quota systems, the alleged religious, racial and political indoctrination of our kids in the public education system, and, of course, the rapidly-declining standards in these institutions, many parents have opted for the private higher education sector which has exploded on the Malaysian scene over the past couple of decades or so.
Unfortunately, we Malaysians appear to be easily swayed, if not duped, by the idea of getting exceptional ‘education’ from foreign-sounding establishments.
Witness, for instance, the success of those joint-programmes between local colleges and foreign universities, especially those from the US and Australia.
Unfortunately, too — and there have been many ongoing reports of these — there have been a number of such private establishments who have been operating as ‘degree mills’ rather than providing quality education. And some of the foreign ‘universities’ they tie-up with aren’t anywhere near the middle of the pile, let alone near the top.
Indeed, some of them aren’t even accredited in their home countries. But, hey, they are foreign and operate in English speaking countries, led by gwai los who, somehow, must know more than us. (Please remind me, how many years has it been since we attained Merdeka?)
So, really, the market need not necessarily produce the best. More often than not, it produces more of what will sell, irrespective of quality. And this, evidently, is true of services, like the provision of education, just as it is of goods.
Of course, structures have been put into place to check on quality, such as the establishment of accreditation bodies, like the MQA (Malaysian Qualifications Agency), but problems still remain.
Complaints about crazy teaching workloads are still heard in the private higher education circle, even in institutions that have been granted ‘university college’ status.
Of course, as we were at pains to point out to Gerry, such heavy workloads will take its toll on teaching quality and the ability of the academic faculty to conduct research and improve themselves. And, invariably, this will affect the quality of the institution’s students.
But such workloads, while unacceptable, are indeed, commonplace in Malaysia at the moment and really needs to be investigated.
And, as a parting shot at the end of dinner to Gerry, who by now had become less convinced about the ‘superiority’ and ‘impartiality’ of the market, we also urged him to initially check out who really are running the colleges he was interested in, from the heads of departments right up to the President or CEO.
We reminded him that while the Malaysian public higher education system, indeed, continuously may be led political puppets and clueless bureaucrats, often the leaders in the private sector are people who are primarily concerned about the bottom line, at the expense of maintaining minimum standards.
Indeed, judging from the tasteless meal that I had had, the impact of market forces can really be problematic, even deceiving.
The writer can be contacted via [email protected].