'Use home schooling to break away from obsession with scoring As'
Published on: Saturday, July 24, 2021
By: Bernama
Kuala Lumpur: The education ministry has been urged to improve or use more effective strategies to reduce the pressure facing students, teachers and parents in implementing home-based teaching and learning (PdPR).
Malaysian Psychiatric Association president Dr Hazli Zakaria said all quarters should also use the PdPR phase to find solutions towards producing high quality students who know how to use their knowledge, and are not merely geared towards getting good examination results.
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“Unfortunately, even in this Covid-19 situation, we are still obsessed with the students’ results or the number of A’s they should be scoring.
“We have to look at this situation and take advantage of it, try to modify what we are trying to achieve,” he said.
Hazli also said those who still had problems with the implementation of PdPR needed to be helped, adding that although some of them were now comfortable with the system, attention should also be given to those who were still trying to adapt.
Hazli, who is a psychiatrist at Alaminda Specialist Clinic, said among the actions that could be taken was to obtain accurate information on the experiences of those who went through PdPR for improvements to be made.
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“We have to get (the information) from the grassroots themselves, comprising students, parents, teachers, administrators, and all of them have to provide the information because the data is very useful to improve the quality of learning in the country,” he said.
He added that the education ministry should take into account the differences between schools in the urban and rural areas as every school faces different challenges, and with accurate information provided by relevant stakeholders, the implementation of PdPR could be further strengthened.
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He said the policy set by the ministry was already good, but its implementation could be fine-tuned to address specific challenges and meet the desired objectives.
Hazli advised those involved in the implementation of PdPR to not just expect the government to solve their problems because efforts to improve teaching and learning require the cooperation of all parties involved.
The ministry, he said, had done its best and that it should not be sensitive to complaints from those who were unhappy with the implementation of PdPR.
On July 17 this year, the education ministry announced that the schooling session via PdPR will continue until Aug 31.
The ministry also decided that schools will be opened in stages for teaching and learning using face-to-face classrooms from Sept 1, after taking into consideration the current vaccination rate in the country.
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