14 - Malaysia's Education, Off Course: Heady Growth, Systemic Woes, Small Fixes

Summary

Introduction

Education, economy, and society interact in mutual relationship, but in recent decades increasing attention has been cast in the direction of academia's contribution to economic growth and social development. This is partly a natural outcome of Malaysia's climb up the development ladder, where policy focus broadens from providing universal basic schooling to generating mass higher education and addressing both the quantity and quality of learning. Policy rhetoric has acknowledged, in line with the need to shift away from low-wage and labour-intensive production, that Malaysia must transit toward more skill- and knowledge-intensive output and cultivate a more innovative economy. Visions of a more integrated society and a more mature democracy have also been projected, most notably in Vision 2020. Education institutions play a paramount role in these processes, both to transform themselves and to facilitate multifaceted transformation, particularly in light of aspirations to be a knowledge-based economy.

Malaysia has made considerable quantitative gains, attaining near universal primary schooling and high secondary enrolment rates and steadily expanding tertiary education. However, the quality of educational institutions has fallen short, even regressed, in terms of mass generation of a skilled and innovative workforce and a knowledge-oriented society. Growth in educational provision has facilitated the rise to an upper middle income economy, but mediocrity in educational outcomes constitutes a major barrier to Malaysia's goal of attaining a high income economy and broad socio-political development. The fundamental problem lies in a systemic decline in the teaching profession and the failure to attract capable entrants, exacerbated by a drift toward redressing the education malaise through marginal and mechanical solutions.

From the early 1990s, Malaysia embarked on a new phase of development, in which the balance between growth and equity tilted more toward the former. The main thrust of the New Economic Policy (NEP) from 1971 was to restructure the economy, predominantly through interracial redistribution and affirmative action programmes favouring the majority Bumiputera. Preferential programmes remained decidedly intact beyond the NEP's official closure in 1990, but education policy became increasingly framed in terms of human capital or human resource development. There was no shortage of rhetoric, targets, programmes, and institutional changes in line with lofty national ambitions.