Skip to main content

Chinese School vs National Kebangsaan School

My eldest girl, Jane, turned 7 this year. She started Primary One. There was no doubt in our mind which type of school for her. It had to be Chinese School aka SJKC (Sekolah Jenis Kebangsaan Cina), of course. With the poor state of our national schools as well as the horror stories one hears about the flip flop of the syllabus plus the laziness of the teachers, most Malaysian Chinese parents will send their kids to SJKC. In fact, in the school we signed her into, I often saw many Malay and Indian students. Malays and Indians studying Chinese! This was uncommon, indeed - or perhaps, it was more common than you think.

Unfortunately, 2 months after she went to this SJKC(*), we pulled her out. Yep, we decided that Chinese school was not suitable for her. Every night she came back crying and was in fear of going to school. Every morning, she needed 30-40 minutes of prep talk before she agreed to go school. Every day she had this worried and extreme stress look on her face. When she came back in the evening, she immediately started her homework. She did her homework even while eating dinner. She was so fearful of her Bahasa Teacher, who ironically is a Chinese, that she would even chanted her ejaan (spelling) while in sleep.

She was terrified of the Bahasa Teacher who used cane to threaten the students. When she had 4 out of 8 correct spellings, she was punished - she had to stand up with two hands up on the air. One time, she forgot to bring her exercise book and was asked to stand outside the class. Actually, it's not just the Bahasa teacher. Even the Mandarin Teacher, which was her class teacher (and this teacher was one of the better ones) would also lash out milder punishment as a way to force the children to improve.

There was no joy in studying anymore. A Primary One kid were being drilled and grilled to be perfect in her school work. Every day is a day of endless grinding - writing and writing and writing so that they remembered the words - be it English, Bahasa or Mandarin.

One evening, she had a meltdown. She started screaming. Her old symptoms of fear, which used to grip her when she was a baby, was back. We knew, in that instance, that this meltdown was due to stress. Adults would break down when they had too much stress, what more a child of 7. The following day, we stopped sending her to school. Her spirits immediately changed. You could see relieve in her face when she knew she did not have to go back to school.

We spoke to many parents of the same school. One parent said that her son, who is now in Primary Two, is always in tears when doing homework. There was so much homework to do and they had to do it because of the fear instilled since young.

The other parents' son was in Primary Four and they pulled him out because they didn't think it was the proper way to educate the young. They told us that 30% of her son's friends were pulled out of the school as well. They said that if we thought there was a lot of homework at Primary One, it would get worse in Primary Three and Four. If we were thinking of pulling out, now is the time to do it. Why wait till Primary Four?

If the state of our national school was bad, Chinese school was the extreme opposites. What choices do we have? Private schools? International schools? These cost a bomb! Home schooling? We were quite lost at that time.

(*) I wanted to add that there are also many types of SJKC and Sekolah Kebangsaan. There are the normal ones, the Cluster Schools (Sekolah Kluster Kecemerlangan) and, I found out much later, there are the High Performance Schools (Sekolah Berprestasi Tinggi). The school will proudly show their status in their signage if they are Cluster Schools. This SJKC which Jane went into is a Cluster School. We enrolled her there because it's about 1km from our home.

Comments

  1. so happy that Jane has a loving , sensitive , smart & supportive parent.
    happy that she is enjoying her young age learning ....

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One million daimoku

In April 2008, Anne and I started our resolution to chant 1 million daimoku in one year. It's already Jan - and I am only one-third of the way. I really need to WORK HARDER - coz I made another 1 million resolution from Jan - Dec 2009. The chart you see on the right of this post is a chart that we put beside our butsudan. It tracked our chanting progress. Every 20 minute, we coloured one box. Mine is the one on top, Anne's at the bottom - you can see that she made much better progress than me! Hmmm.. come to think of it, I am not even at one third!! --- Edit 22 March 2009: Thanks to Google, a couple of friends in faith found this post and they want to know how many hours of chanting is required to achieve one million diamoku. Here it is. Based on our publication in Malaysia, 20 minutes of chanting is equivalent to 1,000 daimoku. So, one hour is 3,000 daimoku. 1 million would take about 333 hours. --- Edit 8 April 2018: Checking my blogger stats, this post is pretty hi

Amazon Alexa in Malaysia - does it work well? A review...

Feels like Christmas in September. Thanks to Doktor Cinta, my friend who live in Australia. Back in July, Amazon Australia had a Prime Day. I joined the trial using my usual Amazon account and ordered an Echo Dot, Echo Plus (the taller one with a built-in hub) and a Kindle Paperwhite, shipping them to a dear friend in Australia. My friend visited Malaysia and brought the Echos with him two weeks ago. You can imagine my thrill to get my hands on Alexa and start using it... in Malaysia. As a side story, sometimes, you can't believe how events are aligned properly to prepare my place to be a connected home - I bought a superb new mesh network router, eero (by the way, I'd say it's one of my best electronic purchases after an iPhone! It is that good), which acts as a strong WiFi backbone as it blanket my double storey house with a reliable and fast WiFi. Then, maxis launched Fibernation program which let me to upgrade my internet from 6 Mbps (pathetic) to 100 Mbps wit

Who is the official service center for Seiko watches?

The Great Blue; Kinetic Auto Relay 100M I have a 15 year old Seiko watch which I love very much. It's a Great Blue series and kinda one-of-its-kind, because Seiko discontinued it as soon as it was launch. So, there are very limited number of units. The watch I own is a Kinetic Auto Relay which means it is powered by my arm movement. And the nice thing about it is that if I don't use my watch, it hands will not move but the Kinetic capacitor which stores energy (up to 4 years of inactivity) will continue to keep track of the time. When I picked up the watch and shake it a bit, it will wake up and auto adjust to the correct time whether it is AM or PM. But my watch is 15 year old. At that age, the capacitor cannot hold a lot of charges. These days if I left my watch unused for 2 days, the watch stopped keeping time. I need to get the capacitor replaced. But who is the official service center for Seiko? The thing about luxury watches is that if you don't send it to