Have we forgotten our forgotten children?

“Teacher, can you spell for me ‘bersungguh-sungguh’?” asked the seventeen year old, looking hopefully at me for an answer.

I sounded the words to him. “Ber-sung-guh... can you try to spell it yourself?” I watched as he struggled to get the words right. After a few failed attempts, he finally managed to spell "bersungguh-sungguh".

A few months ago, Dr. Frederico Gil Sander, World Bank senior economist for Malaysia, said that the poor quality of Malaysia’s education system is more worrying than the level of debt in its households. He said Malaysians should be “alarmed” that their children are doing worse in school than children in Vietnam, a country poorer than Malaysia.

I disagree. 

I believe that the poor quality of our education system is more worrying than ANY other issue in the country. At the rate we are going, we should be panicking.

Walk into any last class in a government school and it will be almost impossible to miss the air of hopelessness in it. Students will be slouched on the table, fast asleep. Some will be waiting to go out for a smoke. Others will be staring into space and you’ll have the attention of about five students. Out of the five, two will be dyslexic and the other three will refuse to do any work.

You’ll come in with your lesson plans and teaching aids and it will all go down the drain because you’ll realise that these students are at least seven years behind their actual standard.

Two years into teaching and I still ask myself the same questions. Who failed? Who is to be blamed?

I struggled this year to get my students to read and write in simple English. Even with all my efforts, my entire Form 1 class could not manage a decent score in their final year exam. In fact, most of them scored zeros.

It was heart wrenching to see my kids rush up to me with their exam paper saying, “But teacher, you told us we were doing well. You told us we could finally read in English”.
I could not find the words to tell them that they are still so far behind; it will be an impossible feat to catch up with the system.

For my Form 4 class, it was different. In an act of desperation, I committed the worst sin any teacher could do. I found myself teaching for the exam. Instead of teaching English, I made my students learn the skills and techniques to answer the exam.

It was the usual, “Pick out this word. Then you copy from this line to this line and you memorise these sentences and put it in.” I cringed as the words came out from my mouth but I knew it had to be done if I wanted my students to get any marks for the exam.

And I know I’m not alone. I know many other teachers are no longer teaching English but the skills to pass the English test.

We should come to terms that it cannot be "business as usual" for our students who are left behind. We should be worried. We should be panicking. We have allowed our students to come up to Form 4 without being able to read or write in Malay, let alone in English. We should be worried that our students feel hopeless in school because they’re unable to catch up on Maths, Science, Geography or History because they are illiterate. We should be worried that our kids are putting on their uniforms and coming to school everyday and NOT learning anything useful.

According to Unesco, global statistics show that there are 122 million youths who are illiterate.  Do we just accept this as an injustice of life or are we really working towards helping our young people get back on track with reading and writing?

I believe we need a system in place to identify students who are unable to catch up with the syllabus and give them all the necessary skills and tools to help them read and write in Malay and English. We need intervention at every form and special classes for these kids where they do not have to follow through the syllabus and then sit for a standardised test and fail it because they are left behind.

There is a pressing need for us to look out for our "forgotten" children, the ones who have slipped through the system unnoticed year on year and build them up again. I fear that illiteracy will soon be an epidemic in Malaysia and we will start accepting it as a norm to have a large number of illiterate youths in the country.

I fear that we have gotten so caught up with Pisa rankings and test scores that we have forgotten what it is like to teach every child in our class how to read and write. I fear we have forgotten the "forgotten" children.

“Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble” – Peter S. Jennison, author. – November 13, 2014.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.