The case of Anucia, which Tony blogged about last month, seems to have struck a chord with you all: there are over 60 comments and counting on the post. Many are critical of Anucia's failure to research the government's requirements for a teaching post. A lot of people seem to have missed the critical point: if we want better teachers, we need to recognise more good universities. That's basically it -- as for what Anucia should do in her personal situation, the answer is fairly obvious: look for a private sector job, be it here or overseas. But what I want to draw more attention to is the important issue of information when it comes to education; there is an immense knowledge gap which often makes a huge difference in where people end up, and not enough people seem to have this in mind.
My father comes from a rural New Village. The fact that he has a PhD from a prestigious foreign university is almost a fluke. He was fortunate that my grandparents earned enough to put him through university overseas; he tried to apply for a government scholarship, but received what he thought was a rejection letter. Looking back, he realises now that he could have gotten a scholarship if he'd tried harder -- and if not for my grandparents' good fortune and hard work, he might not have gone overseas at all.
Tony and Kian Ming both went to Singapore for secondary school -- like many other middle- to upper-class Malaysian students, they escaped our rapidly-deteriorating public school system. But not many Malaysians know about these kinds of opportunities -- I was only vaguely aware of them when I was in school, and I am in a solidly upper-middle-class area. A lot of times, the question of who gets what opportunities is pretty much up to the roll of the dice, because so many people are not in a position to know what opportunities are out there.
In my part of Petaling Jaya, many students from SMK Damansara Jaya and Damansara Utama go on to attend one of the prestigious United World Colleges for pre-university. Are the students at DJ and DU particularly smarter than their peers elsewhere? Not particularly -- it just happens that a few DJ and DU alumni found out about the UWCs, applied there, got in, and then told their juniors about the opportunity. I never even heard of the UWCs until I went to university.
One of my friends, who is now working, applied on a whim to Bates College -- one of the best liberal arts colleges in the US -- because one of her best friends applied there. He applied there because many of his family members went there. Because she applied, her friends applied as well. For several years, the Malaysian population at Bates was almost entirely comprised of this motley crew. There's no particular reason that this should have been the case, except for simple information asymmetry.
If all Malaysians knew about the UWCs, or about American liberal arts colleges, the situation would be quite different, I am certain. But nobody really seems aware of just how important awareness is. Knowing is easily half the battle here -- you can't apply to Harvard if you've never heard of it. You can't get financial aid from a liberal arts college if you don't even know what financial aid is.
One commenter on Tony's post wrote: "I feel that being young (a subjective measure of age) and having parents that are not well-educated (as you have assumed) are not valid factors that contribute to [Anucia's] predicament now." This is flat-out wrong. If Anucia were older when she applied to do her degree, and if she had come from a more educated family background, she would have more information about how the education system works and what sort of opportunities are out there. That's about as straightforward as you can get.
People in urban areas and from upper-income backgrounds often underestimate how much luck can play a role in securing a good education. People from rural areas and from poor backgrounds simply do not have the educational resources or practical experience to make the right decisions, and this is a major reason why so many Malaysians do not get as good an education as they could have. Blame them for their predicaments all you want -- that will not solve the problem.
Showing posts with label Rural Areas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rural Areas. Show all posts
Saturday, November 07, 2009
Saturday, January 03, 2009
A trip to the bookstore
A little departure from the regular post. It is inspired by a trip I recently took to the bookstore with 4 refugee kids who recently migrated to the US from a Southeast Asian country (Not Malaysia!) because their tribe was being persecuted by the central government in their country. My wife and I were giving some of them Math tuition for about a year before we had to stop because of my thesis commitments. We bought each of the eight kids in the family a Barnes and Nobles gift card and I brought 4 of them (space constraints in the car) to a Barnes bookstore on Monday so that they could use their giftcards to buy some books. It was a learning experience, for them as well as for me.
The oldest kid in the car was a boy, 15. The girls were aged 8, 10 and 13. I thought I could just leave them to roam about the bookstore by themselves to pick and choose the books which they would like to purchase. But I thought wrong.
When I was young, my parents used to dump me in a bookstore and let me wander around there for hours while they did their shopping. I would pick and choose the books I liked. These would include Enid Blyton books (moving from Brier Rabbit to Famous Five as I got older), Time Machine, Choose your own Adventure, Lone Wolf, Dragonlance, etc... You get the picture. I never needed anyone to help me choose books.
I was wrong in making the same assumption with regard to the kids I brought to Barnes (temporarily my adopted children, I like to think). They had never been in a bookstore of this size before though they had been in libraries. More importantly, they had never bought a book for themselves. Not only did they have to pick and choose a book (or two) for themselves, they also had to figure out how much they were willing to spend on each book.
(Aside note: Gift cards are a great thing to teach kids how to budget. Instead of buying books for your kids and friend's kids, get them gift cards instead)
In the end I had to help 3 of the 4 kids pick out a book each. One picked a book on anatomy (I'm convinced that she will be a doctor when she grows up), another picked a book on dogs and another a book about fairy tales.
They had some money left over on their cards which I'm hoping they will use either on their own or when I bring them there next. Maybe the other 4 kids.
The larger lesson I learned which I think may apply to Malaysia is that their situation may not be so different from that of some Malaysian kids from some of the rural and semi-rural areas who are also from financially disadvantaged backgrounds (high correlation there). I think if you were to bring some of them (not all of course, I'm generalizing) to a place like Borders or Books Kino, they may find it to be an equally intimidating experience. I'm just guessing.
I'm not sure that it would be necessarily helpful to expose some of the rural kids to these kinds of bookstores. Perhaps a better way would be to bring mobile libraries to some of these rural areas. And have reading programs in these schools which will perk up their interest in reading books, in whatever language. For this, you really need good teachers who are skillful enough to excite kids about reading. Not something easy to do. Getting the books to the kids is only part of the step. Having a nurturing home and school environment are equally if not more important.
The oldest kid in the car was a boy, 15. The girls were aged 8, 10 and 13. I thought I could just leave them to roam about the bookstore by themselves to pick and choose the books which they would like to purchase. But I thought wrong.
When I was young, my parents used to dump me in a bookstore and let me wander around there for hours while they did their shopping. I would pick and choose the books I liked. These would include Enid Blyton books (moving from Brier Rabbit to Famous Five as I got older), Time Machine, Choose your own Adventure, Lone Wolf, Dragonlance, etc... You get the picture. I never needed anyone to help me choose books.
I was wrong in making the same assumption with regard to the kids I brought to Barnes (temporarily my adopted children, I like to think). They had never been in a bookstore of this size before though they had been in libraries. More importantly, they had never bought a book for themselves. Not only did they have to pick and choose a book (or two) for themselves, they also had to figure out how much they were willing to spend on each book.
(Aside note: Gift cards are a great thing to teach kids how to budget. Instead of buying books for your kids and friend's kids, get them gift cards instead)
In the end I had to help 3 of the 4 kids pick out a book each. One picked a book on anatomy (I'm convinced that she will be a doctor when she grows up), another picked a book on dogs and another a book about fairy tales.
They had some money left over on their cards which I'm hoping they will use either on their own or when I bring them there next. Maybe the other 4 kids.
The larger lesson I learned which I think may apply to Malaysia is that their situation may not be so different from that of some Malaysian kids from some of the rural and semi-rural areas who are also from financially disadvantaged backgrounds (high correlation there). I think if you were to bring some of them (not all of course, I'm generalizing) to a place like Borders or Books Kino, they may find it to be an equally intimidating experience. I'm just guessing.
I'm not sure that it would be necessarily helpful to expose some of the rural kids to these kinds of bookstores. Perhaps a better way would be to bring mobile libraries to some of these rural areas. And have reading programs in these schools which will perk up their interest in reading books, in whatever language. For this, you really need good teachers who are skillful enough to excite kids about reading. Not something easy to do. Getting the books to the kids is only part of the step. Having a nurturing home and school environment are equally if not more important.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Helping kids in rural areas
My wife and I have been volunteering as Math tuition teachers for a few kids from a Vietnamese hill tribe who have recently migrated to the US as refugees. It has been a challenge as well as a blessing and our experience of teaching these kids led us to draw comparisons between them and some of the Orang Asli and Sarawak and Sabah Bumiputera and even Malay kids in rural Malaysia.
We teach 3 or 4 kids out of the 8 kids in the family and we focus primarily on Math. We teach them on a Tuesday evening and other volunteers teach them English, History and other subjects on the other days of the week (not including weekends). These kids are really sweet and innocent but they also come from a background where many things we take for granted are just not taught or not known.
For example, when we told them that we were from Malaysia, they didn't even know where Malaysia was. To them, we might as well have been from India or Africa since they couldn't place Malaysia on a map. (They also had not heard of Siem Reap in neighboring Cambodia) I won't be too surprised if many orang Asli kids in Peninsular Malaysia or Iban kids in Sarawak or Kadazan kids in Sabah in the interior areas do not know where Vietnam was either.
They also had a very limited understand of what money was which made it difficult for me to teach one of the kids - a 12 year old - about money. He had some difficultly in answering me when I asked him how much would he have left if I gave him a 20 dollar bill and asked him to give me two 5 dollar bills in return.
Also absent was any understanding of what geometry and geometric shapes are which makes it difficult to explain concepts such as the difference between area and perimeter.
They have made vast improvements since coming to the US probably because they have had volunteer tuition teachers come to them almost every day of the week for the past year or so. They receive very little personal attention from their own class teachers because of the large class sizes in their school. And yet, I suspect that they are still some way behind their peers.
This experience made me think the following - If these kids, with the help of volunteers who come to them everyday of the week, have trouble keeping up with their peers, how much more challenging is it for the Orang Asli and Malay kids in the rural areas to keep up with their urban peers? I think many of them would have the same kinds of problems of context which these Vietnamese refugees face. Many things which urban kids take for granted, such as the concept of money, geography, travel, newspapers, etc... are more or less absent in the rural areas in Malaysia. It is not that surprising, given this context, that some schools in Sabah have a 100% fail rate when it comes to UPSR or PMR exams!
My heart really goes out to these kids in the rural areas since very little is down to help them with their educational deficiencies. I know of some social organizations and programs which are organized by people in urban areas to travel to some of these more rural areas to help the people out but these efforts are mostly restricted to development projects or activities. It is much more difficult to sustain an effort which ships in volunteers to give tuition to these kids on a weekly much less daily basis.
One way to rectify this shortcoming is to send in more teachers to teach in these rural areas. I remember hearing about the MOE giving more hardship and transportation allowances to teachers who have to travel long distances to teach in rural schools in Sabah and Sarawak. Perhaps these sorts of efforts can be increased. Also, a similar program to the one in the US called Teach for America, where recent college graduates commit themselves to teach in an under resourced urban or rural school for 2 years can be introduced. This can be done with subsidies from the government as well as strategic partnerships with local companies. I think as Malaysians become richer and more educated, the willingness to serve in these volunteer and semi-volunteer capacities will also increase. The challenge here is to create the infrastructure for these volunteers to serve.
Another possibility is to give financial incentives to parents of many of these kids from disadvantages families which are contingent on these kids staying in school. Such a program, called Opportunidades, has been implemented in Mexico for the past decade or so and is in the process of being copied in certain urban and economically deprived areas in the US.
I really think that education is the most important means by which these kids in rural areas can escape from a cycle of poverty and want. Government policy is one way of helping these kids out. Another is through the efforts of dedicated and motivated young people. We all can do our own little part.
P.S. I'm well aware that many urban kids who come from less well to do families face similar challenges. I remember trying to give tuition to some kids from a Chinese Village just off Old Klang Road. Most of them preferred to play with the computer instead of sitting down and revising their Math problems. But these challenges are multiplied in the rural areas because of the lack of resources in their schools.
We teach 3 or 4 kids out of the 8 kids in the family and we focus primarily on Math. We teach them on a Tuesday evening and other volunteers teach them English, History and other subjects on the other days of the week (not including weekends). These kids are really sweet and innocent but they also come from a background where many things we take for granted are just not taught or not known.
For example, when we told them that we were from Malaysia, they didn't even know where Malaysia was. To them, we might as well have been from India or Africa since they couldn't place Malaysia on a map. (They also had not heard of Siem Reap in neighboring Cambodia) I won't be too surprised if many orang Asli kids in Peninsular Malaysia or Iban kids in Sarawak or Kadazan kids in Sabah in the interior areas do not know where Vietnam was either.
They also had a very limited understand of what money was which made it difficult for me to teach one of the kids - a 12 year old - about money. He had some difficultly in answering me when I asked him how much would he have left if I gave him a 20 dollar bill and asked him to give me two 5 dollar bills in return.
Also absent was any understanding of what geometry and geometric shapes are which makes it difficult to explain concepts such as the difference between area and perimeter.
They have made vast improvements since coming to the US probably because they have had volunteer tuition teachers come to them almost every day of the week for the past year or so. They receive very little personal attention from their own class teachers because of the large class sizes in their school. And yet, I suspect that they are still some way behind their peers.
This experience made me think the following - If these kids, with the help of volunteers who come to them everyday of the week, have trouble keeping up with their peers, how much more challenging is it for the Orang Asli and Malay kids in the rural areas to keep up with their urban peers? I think many of them would have the same kinds of problems of context which these Vietnamese refugees face. Many things which urban kids take for granted, such as the concept of money, geography, travel, newspapers, etc... are more or less absent in the rural areas in Malaysia. It is not that surprising, given this context, that some schools in Sabah have a 100% fail rate when it comes to UPSR or PMR exams!
My heart really goes out to these kids in the rural areas since very little is down to help them with their educational deficiencies. I know of some social organizations and programs which are organized by people in urban areas to travel to some of these more rural areas to help the people out but these efforts are mostly restricted to development projects or activities. It is much more difficult to sustain an effort which ships in volunteers to give tuition to these kids on a weekly much less daily basis.
One way to rectify this shortcoming is to send in more teachers to teach in these rural areas. I remember hearing about the MOE giving more hardship and transportation allowances to teachers who have to travel long distances to teach in rural schools in Sabah and Sarawak. Perhaps these sorts of efforts can be increased. Also, a similar program to the one in the US called Teach for America, where recent college graduates commit themselves to teach in an under resourced urban or rural school for 2 years can be introduced. This can be done with subsidies from the government as well as strategic partnerships with local companies. I think as Malaysians become richer and more educated, the willingness to serve in these volunteer and semi-volunteer capacities will also increase. The challenge here is to create the infrastructure for these volunteers to serve.
Another possibility is to give financial incentives to parents of many of these kids from disadvantages families which are contingent on these kids staying in school. Such a program, called Opportunidades, has been implemented in Mexico for the past decade or so and is in the process of being copied in certain urban and economically deprived areas in the US.
I really think that education is the most important means by which these kids in rural areas can escape from a cycle of poverty and want. Government policy is one way of helping these kids out. Another is through the efforts of dedicated and motivated young people. We all can do our own little part.
P.S. I'm well aware that many urban kids who come from less well to do families face similar challenges. I remember trying to give tuition to some kids from a Chinese Village just off Old Klang Road. Most of them preferred to play with the computer instead of sitting down and revising their Math problems. But these challenges are multiplied in the rural areas because of the lack of resources in their schools.
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