Sin Chew Daily

A new academic year is about to start soon, and the watered down Seni Khat controversy once again surfaces.

From the information made available to Sin Chew Daily, some SJKCs in Selangor have already received notices from the authorities to start conducting surveys on the incorporation of Jawi calligraphy in Year 4 BM textbooks in 2021.

This survey will decide whether the teaching of Jawi should be incorporated in the BM curriculum of Year 4 students in a school. Jawi calligraphy will only be taught if the PTA and more than 51% of parents and students have agreed to its implementation.

This stale issue has been dragged on for some time now with no conclusive solution yet.

Deputy education minister Datuk Dr Mah Hang Soon has earlier proposed a multilingual pamphlet that includes not only Jawi but also the introduction of Chinese, Tamil, Iban and Kadazan-Dusun languages after consulting various Chinese educational bodies. While the proposal has received widespread acceptance, no follow-up decision has been made so far.

Many SJKCs in the country have already conducted their own surveys and have expressed their firm positions on this issue. Of the 1,297 SJKCs in the country, 1,262 or an overwhelming 97.3% have opposed to the teaching of Jawi at their schools.

Such a position should be clear enough and the authorities should have a clear picture of the attitude of SJKCs, but why keep insisting to run the surveys again in a bid to push their Jawi agenda?

Dongjiaozong has already urged the school boards, PTAs and parents to be firm in their position to reject the teaching of Jawi at their schools. It is generally believed that the survey results will not be any different from last year's. As such, why must the ministry insist that the school authorities squander their precious time and energy to carry out similar surveys over again at the height of the coronavirus pandemic?

The education sector is itself put under tremendous pressure in the face of the pandemic. The effectiveness of online learning is being queried, and the student's progress will invariably be affected as there are no decisions on whether they should return to school as originally scheduled. The ministry and school authorities should by right dedicate themselves to helping the students catch up with their schoolwork to make up for the "lost year" instead of extending the controversy over the teaching of Jawi.

This issue aside, SJKCs still have plenty of other problems to solve, and all these warrant the serious attention of the authorities.

Jiaozong has listed some of the major problems encountered by SJKCs over the past one year, including shortage of qualified teachers, fiscal allocations, relocation of school premises, merger of micro schools and extremist remarks threatening to close down Chinese schools, among others.

All these problems need to be looked into with much higher urgency, and the authorities need to put in more resources and energy to address them.

Education is the foundation of nation-building and the education ministry must shoulder this momentous responsibility to put the resources and energy in the right places.

In the near term, the ministry should evaluate the effectiveness of online teaching during the pandemic and draw up effective solutions to ensure students can catch up with the progress.

In the long term, the issues of shortage of qualified teachers, allocations, relocation and merger of micro schools, etc., must be institutionalized.

With so many problems at hand, we simply cannot afford to create more problems and controversies for ourselves.

We are very sure the learned decision-makers at the ministry can apprehend such a simple reasoning without much difficulty.