Guru Kencing Berdiri, Murid Kencing Berlari

The future of Malaysian educational system is changing and there is never a dull moment in that process. The most recent argument touches about the split concept between what is PBS and the need of all the web related works that congested the main frame of teacher roles in school.

We are in need of changes, we can’t runway from the facts that education today is differ from what it supposed to be ten years ago and teachers today can’t say that the very foundations of the traditional methods of teaching is the best formulated remedies to help us today.

Education is about knowledge and with knowledge it empower people to develop and development does not happen in one day and can’t cater for the need of one specific group of people. PBS may not be relevant to us because we are the beginner as the same goes during the first introduction of KBSR, who would thought that Malaysia would run away from its adopted foreign policies in educations and develop a curriculum that is circular to its own people. Don’t’ you think most teacher argue that KBSR is not the best system, yes it does. I still heard the retired teacher saying that during their time English qualities are much better and those who learn English are at much higher standard than what we are having today. To be honest that is true in one sense.  

What is the need to abolish PBS, because of the works loads or the irrelevant believed that pupils don’t need recorded progress to perform well in education. I might not see eye to eye with those who believed we are better off not having PBS.

Personally I love PBS, I WAS LOOKING FORWARD WHEN THEY ACTUALLY RELEASED THAT NOTION. However not all concept can help you in a way to make your life easier. Workloads is like hell, documentation is beyond the imagination and that is not the end of PBS – it’s still a good idea. Why?

For the first time in Malaysian Educational System, teacher have a freedom to make a professional judgement, develop blueprint of student achievement and oriented a corresponding curriculum to meet the National Educational Philosophy. Yea, this is not an easy process for a snail and this is not a light weight to carry by a turtle but we as teacher can’t be snail or turtle. We are human and our capability to do things is beyond our own expectation.

Malaysian teachers out there who believed PBS is not working for our pupils, what is the alternative? Have you come out with a working module? Do you have a body of evident to show that your ways is better than what the government are trying to do? Don’t walk outside wearing black just because it’s a good deals.

This is not about picking side on a direction that enable us to live easy, this is not even about changing what is currently relevant. This is about projecting ourselves in the near future. We can’t be writing history of education at par with what we dreamed the future will be like. We need to write education as if the future is now and that the knowledge is vital for the moving of each generations.

Stop puckering issues about the indecency of our system and start to do effective actions that could help to boost our own confident in the system. We are teacher. The hand of the mind, the beginning of each ambitions, why is it we still failed to say that we could generate changes by doing what is needed.

I’m a teacher, I do understand the struggle but what I can’t believe is that teacher are the first to complain when something start to happen. How many of us (teacher) walk in the classroom and say to our pupils that all of them could be Prime Minister. How many of us hold their hand when they got an “E” and say to that person an “A” is for the ambitious person but an “E” just specially give for the excellent ones.

We don’t do that. You know why because we don’t seed in ours pupils a dream, we give them reality. We give them reason to discover flaws in each mistake, we develop opportunities for them to fight between the poor and the rich but most importantly we as teacher are trying to repair the wrong doing of our own selves. We look at them as the key, to take away all this mistake and reshape the idealistic world that supposed to be what we wanted to be. 

   

That is why we are fighting to say STOP PBS, stop political influences in education. We are afraid to fail. There is no failure in education, Thomas Edison never stop… Prophet Muhammad S.A.W never stop... and why in the world when there is a burden and difficulties we want to stop.

We keep on saying when the Ministry change, everything change too. New guy come so new policies develop and what we are trying to do now is exactly the same. We are demanding a stop to the old policies and wanted a new one without realizing that sooner or later we will request a stop to that again.

We never learn because we never see the logic of it because we never read between the lines. We educate ourselves to read what is important, to read what is vital for the exam and to read and remember so that we could argued.  That is the result of the old ways of education in Malaysia.

Don’t trust me? Go out and ask, who have ever read Hikayat Hang Tuah as a pleasure or a hobby. Most likely you will end up with people telling you that Hang Tuah is the Malay warrior portrayed in the history book whereas his hikayat is far beyond that.

We don’t educated people but yet we proudly say to monitor pupils progress is a time consuming effort, it’s much easier to finish a book and set an exam. And call those who read that book genius and make them work for our future. Later when another book is out, we end up with a fight because no one in that particular generation ever dare to discover the new book and understand that book. That is who we are now. We are the result of the old system.

I don’t want that to be me because I know who I am and I decided that the future is not going to be about what I think is the future going to be, it’s is what my pupils decided what they want it to be.

I’m here not in the future. So please for those who want to give Malaysia a “black shirt” confrontation as a sign we don’t need PBS, re-think of your action. Don’t colour our thought with an action that make us more confided toward a narrow minded society.

I personally have had enough with all this bullshit parade of colours and now what I wanted to do is to do something positive for my own country. I might be doing it alone but at least I’m doing it for the good of the whole country.

It’s never too small and it’s never too late.