Overcoming Barriers: Tackling Inequality in Education in Malaysia
Education inequality in Malaysia has been a longstanding issue that impedes the country's progress towards achieving the goals set forth in Vision 2020. The current education system has been criticized for failing to provide equal opportunities for all students, particularly those from marginalized communities. Factors such as socio-economic status, ethnicity, and geographical location contribute to the disparities in educational access and quality. These disparities manifest in the form of inadequate infrastructure, lack of resources, and unequal distribution of qualified teachers. To address the topic of inequality in education, this essay would delve into these issues and propose solutions to bridge the gap and provide equitable education opportunities for all Malaysian students.
However, education inequality exists in Malaysia. Based on a study from Rao, R. et al, on the relationship between school inequality and economic growth, found that it is intercorrelated. The average GDP per capita of our country would consequently decrease when the school inequality increases. GDP per capita reflects the earning of a family. Meaning if the average income of a family decreases, average GDP per capita will drop too, making the poor families to become even poorer. If this phenomenon left untreated, the vicious cycle will repeat continuously, forming poverty cycle eventually. Behind the growing income gap, education is one of the key factors. In other words, income inequality is a symptom of education inequality, which exists in Malaysia.
Nevertheless, this reality are not well aware of among those who have been given the privilege of accessing to good education. Definition of educational inequality derived from Wikipedia is the unequal distribution of academic resources, for instance, school funding, qualified and experienced teachers, books and technologies to socially excluded communities. In the light of that concern, there are few causes contributing to this issue, including geographical conditions. For example, some schools in rural areas can only be accessed using limited road or even river transport system. They tend to be isolated and disadvantaged. They may not even aware of scholarships and grants available to them, leading to major differences in the educational success and eventually economic inequality exist.
Undoubtedly, there is the gap exist in quality and accessibility of education between rural and urban area, owing to variations in factors such as family economic, school locations, school and teacher distributions, allocation of school funds, diversity in the implementations of specific reforms, parent-teacher association involvement in school activity etc. First of all, family economic, in other words, socio-economic class is one of the key driver leads to education inequality. Students from poor income families often have poorer academic performance compared to those from low and medium-income families. Due to the financial instability, poorer families face great challenge in sending their children to extra classes and lessons. Some students from poor families might have to work straight away after finishing their secondary school to lessen their parents’ burden or entirely support the families. Deficit in higher education qualification causes them not able to secure a more fulfilling job in the future. Some may even follow their families’ footstep since they do not have role models to look up to especially if everyone in the community comes from the similar low-income family background. In contrast, students from medium and high-income families are privileged enough to pursue higher level of education, having said that their parents have better economic status as well as their awakened general awareness of the importance of education itself.
Apart from that, school location contributes to existence of education inequality too. According to STAR paper, news cited from ‘Greater priority for rural schools’ dated 28th July 2018, the Education, Science and Technological Research Minister, Dato Sri Michael Manyin said many rural schools in Sarawak lacked proper infrastructure and basic amenities such as electricity and treated water supplies as well as road accessibility. For example, about 70% of all schools were physically dilapidated, 375 had no electricity supply and 428 schools in Sarawak still without treated water supply, the sources mainly from rainwater harvest, gravity feed, tube water and water from rivers, which is unreliable. Furthermore, Manyin said 721 schools do not have proper road access, which eventually will affect students’ as well as teachers’ attendance in schools due to the lacking of all- weather road access since some are accessible only by rivers or sea. Aside from the inconvenience, students are exposed to higher risks and dangers when commuting to school using rivers. So, rural schools are at disadvantage, which will impact students’ overall performance, be it in academic or even other skills or competencies.
Another significant variation contributing to the gap between rural and urban areas is teacher distributions. Teacher, undeniably plays a significant and vital role in influencing student learning outcomes, attitudes and academic achievement. And there are differing achievements between students taught by high-quality teachers compared to low-quality one. Therefore, in order to close the gap, a rural school should employ high quality teachers, whom does not limited to adequate academic qualification, but also well-equip with the skills that can cater for students’ learning need and different learning styles. In order to retain the high-quality and talented teachers, adequate pay or salary is one of the attractions. On the contrary, rural schools face challenge like shortage of teachers, mainly caused by the turnover trend as many teachers have decided to move to urban schools which can offer them a much better work condition. This problem arises due to the remoteness of rural schools, lack of support from education department for teachers’ further enhancement through development programmes, work overloaded and poor pay system. And, many teachers in rural schools are expected to do multi-grade teaching due to small size of these schools, hence, they are not able to impart each grade’s curriculum separately. In addition, poor school infrastructure and conditions is one of the factors too. To make the matter worse, rural schools lack of quality school administrators, school principal, causing discrimination in getting fundamental resources.
Information communication and technology (ICT) has been regarded as an important element for the economic growth and social development of a country. However, in rural schools, inadequate coverage of internet and ICT infrastructures, causing education inequality too. Challenges faced by rural schools are limited infrastructures, incapability to buy ICT equipment, lack of knowledge on ICT use, lack of skills and training. Nowadays, a lot of teaching and learning resources are available online. In other words, the development of ICT has changed the teaching and learning process from traditional methods to technology-based approach, which is far more effective and convenient. Nevertheless, with all the challenges exist, students from rural schools are not privileged enough to utilise it. This probably made they unaware of there are scholarships and grants available for them as well. Many of them lost hope to pursue for higher education due to financial problems. They will soon feel lacking of equality when start working as education inequality is directly linked to income inequality nowadays. In order to enhance students’ readiness for higher education opportunities by triggering them to learn to think critically, some instructional supplies such as well-equipped libraries, media centres and laboratories are essential. However, students from rural counterparts are at disadvantage and has limited access to all of these too.
Therefore, in order to provide a decent learning environment for the students from rural schools, rural school revitalization need to be taken into serious consideration by federal government and embarked soon. First of all, a safe and conducive learning environment is extremely important. Students will feel more grateful and the education given are more valued by them under this positive circumstances. In contrast, under-funded school facilities with leaking roofs, poor lighting and ventilation system, will eventually demotivate the students from attending classes. Imagine some rural schools students can only sit on the mats on the floor to do reading and writing due to inadequate supply of table and chair, which is not an appropriate posture for long-term. For those critically dilapidated ones, which lack of basic amenities like electricity and treated water supplies as well as road accessibility need to be on top priority. This is to secure both students and teachers safety while commuting to school.
In addition, a good rural school must come with a good, effective school leader and quality teachers. In view of the high turnover trend among them, opting for a better pay and working environment in urban counterparts, something must be done simultaneously to retain the talents. As nobody will feel motivated to work with low pay. There are some other causes that have triggered an exodus of rural teachers too, like social, cultural, professional isolation, overwork, paying structures, being put on contract without assurance of permanency, inadequate housing allowance and economically deficient surrounding communities. These made recruiting rural school teachers a great challenge. A good pay system, well-packaged with necessary allowances must come into the picture to support their socioeconomic growth, so that they can deliver their professionalism in long run. Same goes to the school leader, principal must be valued too as they are the one to provide high level supports for their school communities, who are students and teachers.
Rural students can excel in academic too, just that they may need more encouragement and opportunities under tougher environment. For example, certain challenges faced by rural school’s teachers and students when DLP, dual language programme, which is a voluntary policy for schools to fully use English in teaching of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects were introduced in Jan 2016. Exposure to the language is the key of improving. Unlike urban students who can benefit from various exposure and interactions, encouraging them to speak English, rural students not given the opportunities neither. That is how challenging for rural students. Even though they can speak English, they do not have many opportunities to use it outside their classrooms. So, teacher play an important role to encourage the rural students to master English via correct language learning strategies such as extensive reading in order to have better opportunities for career advancement in the future. In 2019, in Sabah, LBS Foundation in collaboration with Rotary Club of Kota Kinabalu Pearl worked hand in hand to launch Project REAL (Rural-Focus, English for All) for rural students to increase their accessibility in resources to improve their English, bridging the language gap between rural and urban schools. They set up an English corner at each school with all of the provisions needed to ease the study and a wide range of academic tools, reading materials like English-Malay dictionaries are provided, together with engaging programmes for the student experiences.
Nevertheless, the concept of segregation exists, especially with the education inequality between rural and urban schools. So, aside from emphasizing on academic achievements and good at English, not to forget imparting moral values is utmost important to groom a future talent. However, most rural children are left behind by their parents who need to earn a living and stay far away from them. With such growing environment which is lack of love and attention, the left behind children often lack of confidence and have delayed in both psychological as well as physiological development. Hence, it is extremely important to impart good morals and values within them. On seeing how crucial the matter is, equipping moral education teachers with teacher training schemes and improved teaching materials are inevitable. Apart from incorporating the moral education curriculum, rural students should be given the chances to experience through experiential activities and game-based learning. As such, this will foster optimistic attitudes and good values among rural students.
The exists of segregation concept made rural students feel neglected, causing them tend to mingle with friends from outside school rather than participating in school activities. Some may start indulging in drugs, cigarettes and alcohol at such a young age. Eventually, this will result in the country losing out in terms of having a diverse pools of talent. Therefore, we can conclude that education inequality leaves a huge negative impact to our country. As such, students come from both urban and rural areas should be treated equally, be it in the education schemes or opportunities to excel in the future. Highlighting the critical challenges faced by rural schools currently, for instance, dilapidated building lacking of basic amenities, quality teachers and principals, limited accessibility to ICT, confidence-lacking among rural students due to poor learning environment, low socioeconomic status etc. need to be addressed urgently. Knowing that revitalizing rural schools is not an easy job, especially with the limitation of funds and budget, but yet it has to be done by putting right policy in place to close the gap between urban and rural schools. With that, students from rural schools can have the opportunity to access quality education, and competitive enough to secure for better career advancement in the near future.
