This is an interesting paper: using evidence from Muslims’ fasting in Ramadan to show that fasting is a drag on the economy, but makes Muslims happier!
Education – The Silver Bullet?
Recently a few friends and I had a robust discussion about education. Naturally, the discussion started off with something only tangentially related, i.e. the rapid increase in the proportion of the federal budget that goes into emoluments (i.e. wages and compensation) for civil servants. As is typical for most “kedai kopi” discussion on Malaysian politics, it morphed into a discussion about the decline in the quality of our graduates, as a result of poor education. I made a few observations, in reflection from this discussion:
- Education is not a silver bullet. Many Malaysians think that all the problems facing the country can be fixed through education. In some ways, they are right. Malaysia is in the economic and social rut that it is, largely because we have failed to equip an entire generation of Malaysians. Too many of them are getting sub-standard education at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels, resulting in hordes of local graduates who cannot articulate, are not as adaptable, and require massive retraining by employers in order to be acceptably productive. But fixing education is difficult, and the outcome is naturally lagging, as effective changes in the education sector requires at least a decade for it to substantially ripple through the cohorts of students churned out by the system. And Malaysia’s problems are wide-ranging: poor skill levels, corruption, rising levels of crime, choking roads due to over-abundance of private vehicles, halting economic growth due to long dependence on low-wage policies, large amounts of illicit capital flows, and a whole host of other things. Education is one important lever to solve all these issues, but it is not the only one.
- The solution is not education per se, but institutions as a whole. In a way, when you think about it, the problem with Malaysian education is actually just one instance of the larger, higher-level problem for Malaysia: weak institutions. With a weak education system, the quality of graduates turns out to be inadequate, and we lack the right amounts of skilled and semi-skilled workers which lead on to a surge in migrant workers. With a weak policing system, crime continues unabated while poor standard operating procedures lead to unnecessary deaths of innocent civilians. With a weak judicial system, judgments are not seen as fully above board, and aggrieved parties are much more wary of taking their disputes to court. With a weak political system, extremists can take centre stage and hold the nation ransom to their own narrow interests, while the rakyat are forced to choose between two sets of equally unappetising politicians. With weak safeguards against corruption, public officials and private individuals are free to line their pockets with the people’s money, and can even flaunt their wealth unapologetically in the faces of the rakyat. In this regard, we can only gasp at the wreckage done to our national institutions by the determined iconoclasm of an impatient politician, and must now rebuild our institutions in the face of two decades of systemic erosion.
- BN is the problem, but it can be the solution. Having said all of the above, we cannot ignore the fact that the nation has come a long way, despite all of the weaknesses manifested today by the excesses of the past. For many of my friends who consider themselves to be tribally bonded to the Barisan Nasional, reform can be a very confusing process. Where do you begin, trying to fix the problems faced by the country, when the country has been so firmly shaped by the same Barisan Nasional coalition that continues to lead the country over the past five decades? So far, the government of the day has adroitly skirted around this embarrassing fact. Transformation programmes have been launched, correctly identifying the required changes. But the inability to admit to the excesses of the past, means that internal resistance to change remains high. The nostalgia for Mahathirism is an expression of this strong resistance, and no real momentum for change can probably be borne until there is an open admission from the current leadership of the Barisan Nasional that we have made mistakes in the past, but also that the current leadership has the right diagnosis for transformation. Until then, the country will continue to labour under nostalgia for autocracy, which will only serve to apply friction to earnest efforts to reform the country and bring it closer to the ideal that all Malaysians aspire for.
Exit
This is awesome news for us in Ekuinas – our first major exit from an investment!! Don’t think I can reveal much more than what has been put out in our press release, but suffice to say I think everyone’s happy and wearing smiles 😀
The Rise and Fall of the Body Man
This is interesting – how the humble “body man”, with the right mix of entrepreneurship and chutzpah, can leverage a dogsbody existence into a high-roller life. It is also a sobering reminder of how power intoxicates, and ultimately, poisons.
(Eagle-eyed readers would notice by now that this blogger is a HUGE fan of the West Wing!)
Retirement – Why You Need to Plan
This is sobering – plan well for your retirement, or you might be flipping burgers at 70 🙁
Nate Silver says…
This is insightful – Nate Silver’s take on statistical thinking, and how to build a career in a Big Data-driven world…
Obama’s Healthcare Conversion
This is interesting – sometimes you stumble onto your legacy.
Government’s Role in Managing Unemployment
This is illuminating – the essayist argues that government policy can do much to reduce unemployment; among other things, the essayist argues for protection of infant or threatened industries. Sebenarnya even Americans know that trade protections are necessary to protect jobs, even as they preach to developing nations to dismantle theirs. The hypocrisy of it all!
The Secret Political Life of Corporations
This is an interesting analysis of politics-related activities of corporations, using the notorious now-bankrupt Enron as an example. I wonder what the analogous datasets would be for Malaysian corporation. What is definitely true is that our political financing realities in Malaysia are still definitely mired in Third World norms.
The Malaysian University System, and the Urgent Need for Reform
This is an interesting take on the college diploma/degree as a means for signalling academic/professional aptitude and capability. Certainly, a system that has evolved over the latter part of the last millenium is becoming increasingly anachronistic in its ability to be a reliable indicator of a graduate’s ability to perform in the workplace. (Of equal or even greater concern, of course, is the ability of the university system to become a transmitter of culture, erudition and civilisation across generations, but that is a whole other debate.)
Especially for Malaysia, situated as we are within a burgeoning Asia-Pacific region where the competition for talent will become more fierce in the coming decades, the university system requires deep and critical scrutiny. Clearly we are producing too many graduates, a significant number of whom seem to be unsuited for the demands of the modern global economy, if statistics on graduate unemployment are any indication.
At some point, when we are ready to cast our collective critical eye over the reforms required for tertiary education in Malaysia, some things need special attention:
- Imbuing graduates with the necessary language and communication skills. Too many employers today lament our graduates’ ability to communicate in English, that global lingua franca of business and knowledge. But even more so than the facility with language per se, our universities seem to be churning scores of graduates who do not have the personality and confidence to assert themselves in the workplace. Perhaps it is the preponderance of rote learning; perhaps it is the fact that Malaysian universities treat their students as if they were schoolchildren, mollycoddled and chastised in equal terms; perhaps our schools do not prepare their students well enough to become good graduates, and in turn, good workers and citizens. But certainly our universities are not doing enough, or simply not doing the right things. Creating capable and confident graduates must involve institutions taking the risk to allow their students to give full force and flight to their thoughts and convictions.
- Inculcating curiosity and the continuous desire to learn. Many policymakers insist that universities need to partner with industry to ensure that their curricula are relevant to industry’s needs. But the reality is that no amount of curricula changes can be adequate to catch up with the rapidly evolving nature of the real world. Rather than feeding their students the fish of contemporary knowledge, universities need to teach their students to fish for knowledge, constantly and desirously. Curiosity and a compulsion to learn are the only way that graduates can ensure they are truly future-proof, and able to evolve and learn as their professionals develop and grow over time.
- Injecting a sense of ethics and values. The term “white collar crime” was fashioned for criminal acts of theft, corruption and other malfeasances committed by those exemplary members of society who typically have had the benefit of a good education and upbringing. In the wake of Enron, Madoff, Tyco and other egregious instances of crimes committed by highly-educated professionals, many top-tier MBA schools have begun to increase the emphasis on ethics and values in their curricula. This is all well and good. If anything, I would argue that a more comprehensive approach to ethics and values need to be introduced, especially at the university level when such abstract concepts can and should be debated. And I don’t mean the dry “Pendidikan Moral”-type motherhood statements that often fill the moral education textbooks in the Malaysian education system. Rather, I would have students review the moral teachings of the great religions, and debate the morality of protagonists in great works of literature. There is much that Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, can teach our students about morality, ethics and the human condition.
The university system has a unique role to play, as a “finishing school” of sorts for those destined to be the leaders and professionals of our nation. We ignore the great need for reform, at our own collective peril.
