(How many of the 20 high-performance schools picked by Education Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin would have been your choice?
May be, lets open a debate as to which were the top 20 “high-performance” schools when the country achieved Merdeka in 1957 and became Malaysia in 1963, how many of them are in Muhyiddin’s Top 20 schools and why the rest have lost out in the placings?
Reproduced below is one view by Lee Wei Lian in Malaysian Insider)
The tragic tale of Malaysian education
by Lee Wei Lian
Malaysian Insider
January 27 2010
What do Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, Malaysia’s founding father Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia’s second richest man T. Ananda Krishnan and YTL chairman Tan Sri Francis Yeoh have in common?
The answer: all four studied at once famous schools that are now glaringly absent from the list of 20 high performance schools recently announced by the government.
Victoria Institution (Ananda, Yeoh), St John’s Institution (Najib), Penang Free School (Tunku Abdul Rahman) and others like Malacca High School and St Michael’s Institution are all storied schools that have been allowed to fall behind until they are no longer counted as among the elite educational institutions in the country.
Just imagine if Eton College in the UK or Raffles Institution in Singapore was not recognised as one of the top schools in their respective countries.
That is the equivalent of what has befallen what were once the most respected schools in Malaysia. Today, they do not even rate a mention on a list of the top 20 high performance schools.
It is a crying shame as these schools produced many leaders that were influential in the development of Malaysia and to a lesser extent even in Singapore. Continue reading “Which were the top 20 schools in the early years of the nation?”