07/12/2023
Education is everything for individuals, societies, and more importantly for the peace, prosperity, happiness and security and sovereignty of the nation. Education indeed has a high stake for the state of the nation.
Despite its crucial roles, Education is generally taken for granted. Many forget how each of us were educated in hard ways. Albert Einstein once said "the roots of education are bitter but fruits are sweet". There are world wide wisdom on education, all defining the real meaning and purpose of education. The wisdom on teaching is that teaching should be perceived to offering opportunities to think, not memorise facts. After all, education is what remains when one has forgotten what had been learnt in the classroom. However, step motherly treatment of education and teachers preparedness and progressive growth is posing risk to the joy of learning.
We understand that "truth is painful", but without regrets. It has been nearly a year since I exited, and had time to ponder on education in the past, present and future. We witness a lot happening around the world in education - revamping educational policies, curriculum reformation, assessment transformation; a lot more in the teacher's professional capacity enhancement and transformation of pedagogies.
Elsewhere, innovation and educational reformation transcends beyond the restructuring of the organogram, because the True Quality of Education is action in schools displayed through the transformation of children to good human beings. In essence, in the truest sense, any educational reformation must emanate from school, and not otherwise. My years of experience and guts vehemently echoes that if approached from bottoms up, it may be easy to witness fast results in dramatic changes amongst our youths, owing to our size of the population. For certain, trade of all jacks and masters of none may jeopardize any novel initiatives. Therefore expertise is crucial in the 21st century because the same old tool, by which the old generation was educated and trained is rendered irrelevant.
Much can be done in achieving the national vision of education of "nurture nationally rooted and globally competent citizens", with consertted effort and right skills of all.
With the new government taking the helm of the governance, one can remain optimistic that the new Government reinvigorates education system and practices.