Did I really enjoy going to sekolah kebangsaan?

I was twelve years old and attending a public junior high school in New York City. It was a social studies class and the teacher was one Mr Nelson.

My classmates and I entered the classroom and Mr Nelson had a copy of the day's New York Times for each and everyone of us.

It was the year when President George Bush Sr and the United States declared the first Gulf War against Iraq after Saddam Hussein invaded neighbouring Kuwait.

Mr Nelson gave us twenty minutes to read the story about the war on the front page of the newspaper. He even taught us how to handle and fold a broadsheet!

Once we were done, we were told that we could ask any question we wanted about the story we had just read and about the war. Anything at all.

We started with basic questions like why the US had declared war with Iraq and why Saddam Hussein had sent his troops into Kuwait.

Then we went on to have a lengthy discussion on whether any of us were actually in agreement or disagreement with the decision of the US to declare war with Iraq.

The year before that, I was in sixth grade at a public elementary school, also in New York City, and literary discussions were held in class with our teacher Mrs Buckley on a weekly basis.

We would read popular Jack London novels such as White Fang and then discuss assigned chapters every week.

My classmates and I would discuss how we felt about the characters, the story and how it related to our own lives, and even the author, with Mrs Buckley guiding us along.

I loved going to school.

Then my family and I came back to Malaysia. I went to a public secondary school. I was fifteen and I remember one of the classes I attended required us to write a summary of an essay.

The essay was about a monkey who had to climb a banana tree to get himself a banana. It had four paragraphs, each paragraph had two sentences and each sentence had around five words.

I knew then what the tone of the rest of my compulsory education years was going to be. Haha! But I'm being overly sarcastic here.

There were some good points about school here in Malaysia too, like the two years I was on my school's debate team (I said some!). But you get my drift.

Recently, I compared notes with my youngest brother who is a decade younger than I am. I told him about my years in school outside of Malaysia and he told me of his experience in Malaysia.

In Form Five and at seventeen years old, all he could remember was his teachers using most of the school period to nag the students to study for exams rather than teaching.

And once during a motivational workshop in school, an ustaz spent most of the night trying to find a positive religious definition for his name and couldn't find one.

Luckily we have parents who are caring, attentive, love reading, are open-minded and encourage us to talk about and do all kinds of things, and it rubbed off on us so we turned out as geniuses!

All this makes me wonder if those private international schools that many government ministers are apparently sending their children to are actually much better than public schools.

My daughter is only three years old and it may be a little too early to think about all of this since she's only going to playschool at the moment. But I can't help it.

I haven't explored and really researched how the public school system is now (since I left a million years ago) and neither have I done so for private schools.

Maybe I should start doing so now. The earlier I start finding out, the better. And then work really really hard so I can afford the yearly fees!

That's hardly fair considering that I am a responsible tax payer. But I guess I would do anything I can to give my daughter the most enjoyable educational experience possible. – November 21, 2014.

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