INDEED the 2022 SPM results are shocking. The scores obtained by the 373,974 teenagers who sat for the ultimate examination seal a scary future for Malaysia.
As was analysed by blogger OutSyed The Box in his Monday write-up, we garnered less than 3% of straight A passes.
That is not all.
The prudent question is, what will happen to the rest of the 97% of our young who will not be able to further their studies with choice pathways that promise to provide the nation with the right and needed human capital?
What is shocking is that we had mysterious “grade E” scorers totalling 128,193 (34.3%) candidates. Are they failures too, or will they get a passport to enter the hallways of tertiary institutions? Or will they be absorbed into the bloated civil service?
Likewise, who has the answers to the 160,350, or 43% of the SPM candidates who did not get into the Grade A, C, and unqualified E categories? Where will these seemingly outright, dismissed failures, end up?
Indeed, the 2022 SPM results that we see this year reveal the true elephant in the room. We have repeatedly, over the decades, failed as a nation in building our future. Period.
After eleven years of schooling the young, we discover that half the population failed to get a passport to further their education or become relevant capital for the nation’s future.
Just like the annual auditor-general’s report of repeat disasters affirming massive wastages, mismanagement, leakages, a lack of accountability, and irresponsible failures, we see declining performance among our young students year after year.
Is there no one capable of mustering the courage and brains to revamp our failed education system?
Or is this all part and parcel of a massive political plot to keep our youth from becoming high achievers and not being deemed dropouts?
In this age of accelerating development all around the world, it is impossible to fathom what is holding us back from correcting the countless wrongs in the education system and jump-starting our future human capital needs.
It is mind-boggling that despite decade after decade of concerned citizens and academics raising the alarm, we continue to slide further downward in the quality benchmark of the education standards in the country.
Do our leaders ever want to admit the fact that we have reached a disastrous junction in the nation’s destination, where our graduates and employable youths cannot even write, let alone have the convinced passion to read and speak right, let alone to do it well?
Despite all the slogans, despite the billions of public funds allocated, and despite all the screaming for race rights and privileges, we have a big zero of education success hanging on the neck of the nation’s future.
The “next change” (as we say for new movies) to come is certainly a social disaster as the cumulative millions of school failures fill the streets. – The Vibes, June 14, 2023
J.D. Lovrenciear is a reader of The Vibes
