EDUCATION REFORM MUST GO WITH ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION - DPM MUHYIDDIN

Kuala Lumpur, July 31 (Bernama) -- Malaysia needs to undertake a holistic education reform in tandem with the transformation of the country's economy into an innovation-driven one, Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said Saturday.
"As innovation is the key to our economic transformation, the education system must also move in the same direction.
"We have to further enhance the elements of creativity and innovation in the
curriculum, in the teaching and learning process and in the system of
assessment, with the aim of producing creative and innovative human capital,"
said Muhyiddin, who is also Education Minister, in his keynote address at the
4th Annual Malaysian Student Leaders Summit, here.

In his address, on "The Role of Education in Shaping the Future: The
Realisation of 1Malaysia", he said the country's education system must be able
to equip the young people, the country's future human capital, with the
necessary knowledge and skills which will enable them to create and innovate.

He said this much-needed education reform would certainly produce the right
human capital to move the country to the next level of economic development,
which was driven by creativity and innovation.

Muhyiddin said the education reform would further improve the quality of
schools and enable the young to unleash their true potential to be successful in
the increasingly competitive global economy.

"At the same time, they will help spur economic growth by creating new
wealth for the country and expand the economic cake, which will in turn make
equitable distribution possible," he said.

He also said that reforming the education system would also help build a
united Malaysian nation since the centre of this reform was the democratisation
of education.

By providing and expanding quality education for all children, irrespective
of race, there would be no feeling of alienation or racial prejudices as all
Malaysian children would have equal right to quality education, he said.

He said raising the quality of the country's education also meant
increasing the capacity of the multiracial citizens to uplift their social and
economic well-being, which "will eventually eliminate the root cause of all
conflicts and prejudices in future".


"This is certainly not wishful thinking. In the course of our nation's
history, education has played a very important role in uplifting the lives of
the poor and the needy, especially among the bumiputera community," he said.

Muhyiddin also pointed out that the country's education system also played
an important role in enhancing nation-building and national unity, whereby the
school was not only a physical location for learning but also an agency of
socialisation where children of all races could meet and interact.

In this respect, he said, the government had embarked on an effort to turn
the national school into the school of choice for every pupil irrespective of
race and "an effective agency of social cohesion and national unity".

"We do this by bringing together the children of all races under the
national school system, which not only uses the national language as the medium
of instruction but also caters to the specific needs of its multiracial pupils,
including the pupils' need to learn their own language.

"Therefore, we intend to expand this policy further by introducing Mandarin
and Tamil, the two major vernacular languages in this country, as elective
subjects in national schools," he said, adding that this would provide greater
opportunity for the children of all races to learn these two important
languages.

The two-day summit, carrying the theme "Our Malaysia, Charting the Way
Forward", is organised by the United Kingdom and Eire Council for Malaysian
Students (UKEC) and is attended by about 350 Malaysian tertiary students and
graduates from local and foreign universities.