Amateur Hour On Malaysian Education: All Theater, Minimal Substance

 Amateur Hour On Malaysian Education:  All Theater, Minimal Substance

M. Bakri Musa

Jan 25, 2026

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim introduced on January 20, 2026 his long-anticipated educational reform report. Then right after, his Minister for Higher Education Zamry Kadir chimed in that the necessary legal provisions for those changes have yet to be formulated. Welcome to amateur hour, Malaysian style! A circus with many clowns. You quit clapping only because you realize that they are dealing with the nation’s young and thus her future.  

Only the Executive Summary of the Report was ready and then only on-line. Never mind, the show must go on. The colorful extravaganza at Putrajaya Convention Center consumed the whole morning if not day, with students pulled from their classes from as far away as Tanjung Malim. 

Of all the myriad problems, schools’ broken toilets got Anwar’s attention! That should be the concerns of the janitor or headmaster, not the Prime Minister! Anwar should demand more of his ministers and not let them make him look like a fool. He should not have given that address until he had grilled them and been assured that all the details including the full report were available. 

Back to national education policy, in reality there is none. What Malaysia has instead is a system catering increasingly only to Malays. Not all Malays. The rich (not many) have opted for International schools, the euphemism for English-medium. Ordinary Malays too are now seeing the light and choosing National-Type Chinese schools, to the chagrin of Malay nationalists. 

More ominous is the alarming number choosing religious schools. Unlike similar ones in America where they produce more than their share of the nation’s future professionals and scientists, the Malaysian variety is consumed with medieval Arabic texts, their students consequently science illiterate and mathematically challenged. This glaring and dangerous deficit will be the undoing of Malays and Malaysia, but nobody notices that, or cares. Hence no effort at remedying. These religious schools are the greatest degrader of precious young Malay minds. 

I would have expected the government to mandate daily STEM and English classes for these religious schools. Even Indonesia’s pesanterans are doing that now. Instead, Malaysia chooses to meddle with the Chinese and International Schools. They are already doing quite well, thank you! 

There are other critical challenges, like abysmal PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) performances. Tease those data to separate out the Chinese schools, and the national figures would be much worse. Likewise, the scores for kampung and religious schools would match those of Haiti.

It is appalling that Malaysia made schooling compulsory only last July. It is now proposing lowering the age to six from the current seven, but only for those who pass a special “diagnostic test.” I presume Fadhlina’s Ministry had already designed and field-tested such a test for local children. I can only imagine the consequent cruel tease, “Failed Primary One Entrance Exam!” Fadhlina looked like an idiot explaining her way out of her self-created conundrum. 

Starting preschool at age five is commendable. I would lower that to four especially in rural areas where the need for such early interventions is the greatest. Make it voluntary. When parents see the value, their will enroll their children.

Like her colleague Zamri Kadir earlier, Fadhlina’s subsequent many clarifications only demonstrated that both were not quite ready for prime time.  

At the opposite end the government is micromanaging the universities by telling them what to teach, and to go into joint-ventures with Government-linked companies to build student dorms. Again, like the earlier dilapidated toilets, those should be local decisions. 

The planned placing of post-Form Five classes (assasi, matrikulasi, and Sixth Form) under the university is disruptive, expensive, and a colossal misuse of scarce campus resources. More sensible to expand Sixth Form but reduce it to only one year instead of the current two, thus making K-12 the new norm. That would also reduce the current considerable attrition and loss of good study habits occurring during the long six-month hiatus post-Form Five.

In that glittering presentation, the preliminary speakers were at pains in enumerating the long hours of consultations and preparations. I venture that none of them had visited the many exemplary independent Chinese schools, one only a few miles from the ministry, or drove across the causeway. Nor was there any mention of the massive bureaucracy at many levels crippling our schools and demoralizing our educators while sucking up scarce resources. 

When the full Malaysia Education Plan 2026-2035 Report is released (no telling when that will be) you can bet that, like the previous 2013-2025 Report, the one crucial chapter missing would be this:  What have we learned from the past decade? The bane of Malaysian plans whether educational or others is just that, implementation. You cannot begin to learn from and remedy your mistakes until you know what they are.

Prime Minister Anwar should quit these elaborate showtime extravaganzas. Too early to be in campaign mode. There are plenty of problems to be addressed. These drawn-out spectacles disrupt and distract civil servants. God knows they are already inefficient!