P4P Rally

Just when we thought the PPSMI things had settled down, those not happy with the abolition are planning a national rally in Pj on March 10. The PAGE boss wrote in the Sunday Star with a thinly veiled warning to the Government not to toy with education. While I agree with her that the government should not experiment with the future of our children but there are a few things that she wrote that can be disputed. For a start religious schools with science at the core has been introduced by the government many moons ago. All those schools with the tag SBPI (moniker for sekolah berasrama penuh integrasi) are religious schools offering compulsory science subjects.

Somehow PAGE simply assume that by learning maths and science in BM, people won’t be reading foreign scientific magazine and journals (especially those in foreign languages mainly English). This is rather simplistic view. Any science student at tertiary level or scientists worth his/her salt would be reading all sorts of journals.

I still cannot comprehend with the notion that a nation cannot progress without learning maths and science in English in schools. UK schoolchildren have been learning maths and science in English for ages but they are a nation in a decline. For that matter, I was made to understand the Philipines, Jamaica, Barbados are using English in schools without much success. The likes of Korea, Japan, German, Finland, Sweden progressed by leaps and bounds without having to resort to using English to learn maths and science in schools. No doubt English is being emphasised  but only as a subject in its own right. Basically this is what the Education Ministry is doing – providing bigger emphasis on teaching and learning of English.

A couple of years after PPSMI was introduced, I had a conversation with one of the principal of boarding school in Perak. He was lamenting on the struggle faced by his students to grasp the scientific concepts in English. Most of his students were from the rural areas. He was saying, the students could get a much better results if they do not have trouble grappling with their English.

Well, the raging debate can go on for ages, but I do not think it is fair to blame the May 13th, 1969 as the reason for the Government switching the medium of instruction in schools. They were other reasons as cited in Laporan Razak. Neither it is fair to blame the Government for parents not having a say in their children’s education. The parent teacher association is an open avenue for parents to participate. Unfortunately, from my experience, many PTA events are poorly attended by parents.

 

Who are the real philanthropists?

I disagreed with CEUPACS when they successfully urged the government to lower the cut off point for the civil servants to enter the exit policy. I believe 70% is already low. I mean how could you retain a civil servant who can perform at 70% level without any valid reasons? Our civil service would loose what little credibility we could muster thus far. As it is they are too many deadwoods already eating into the service. We need to get rid of them with dignity, not simply sacking them.

Having said that I am totally agreeable to their concern about the growing income disparity between the JUSAs and the ordinary civil servants. I have no statistics on the income gap between the upper echelons and the general workers like us, but Wan Hulaimi in his article in the NST yesterday said that the CEO pay has exploded from 40 times of the ordinary workers’ pay in the 70s to 300 times in the dotcom boom. Even with gloomy economy now, the CEO pay is still about 200 times more than the pay of a typical worker. I still remember a couple of years back when Khazanah Nasional decided to increase the pay of a national utility company’s CEO while at the same time increasing the tariff for the utility for the rakyat. The Minister in charge at the time bravely defended the decision saying that if you want top people to work for the Government Linked Companies (GLCs) you have to pay top salaries.

Money, money, money - it is the richmen's world.

But in actual fact, the company that the CEO is working won’t be getting as much without ordinary people using and buying their product and paying taxes. Even worse with this utility company that had the monopoly of the business, people had no choice but buy their services/product. Actually the rich are as dependent on the state as the poor. So the fabulously rich get richer at the expense of the poor. Hulaimi further iterated that the poor are subsidising the rich in the forms taxes that they cannot avoid and in the work that they are being underpaid. Barbara Ehrenreich said “the real philanthropists in our society are the people who work for less than they can actually live on because they  are giving their time and energy and talent all the time so that people like you can dressed and fed very cheaply and so on”

A London garbage collector went to Jakarta to taste what is it like to be a garbage collector in Jakarta. He observed his counterpart in Jakarta had to work from dawn to dusk and much of the night only to be paid a meagre sum that sentenced him to live  in shanty town near the garbage dump.

So it is only natural that the rich should give back to the poor. In Islam, this is instituted in the Zakat requirement where those who meet the requirement must pay 2.5% of their riches to the poor and needy. This is Islamic way of narrowing the income gap between the rich and the poor. Unfortunately many of us Muslims conveniently forgot to perform this duty.

Why consumers should not use Facebook as a login for anything other than Facebook

Reblogged from Polarprisca's Blog:

Image via Wikipedia

I’m ruining a new manicure to bring you this consumer warning. That fact is to illustrate the depth of my disappointment with this online slight-of-hand. {Houston-we-have-a-purple polish, in case you were wondering.}

First assumption – you are like me and don’t really read the terms and conditions when you activate an account online. If you do more than scroll and click, then you won’t need to read the rest of this post.

Read more… 183 more words

I got this from fellow Wordpress bloggers. Maybe others should know about it aswell.

Arsenal won 7-1? Must be a fluke.

In the house, currently, they are five of us at every weekend. All of them bar yours truly are strong followers of Arsenal. Weekend game involving Arsenal has become a family bonding session of sorts. Armed mugs of coffees, kuacis or groundnuts we would gather round the idiot box (well it isn’t a box anymore these days, more of a an elongated thin cuboid) and shouted ourselves hoarse. You could be forgiven for thinking our lounge has become a Stadium Astro of some sorts. After almost half of the EPL season gone, Arsenal’s flip flop peformance did not prepare us for last night’s result. Not after its terrible performance against Bolton the other week.

When Balckburn equalised to cancel van Persie’s early lead, I told my daughter, here we go again. But after Thierry  Henry’s goal, I had to swallow back my words. It was an ordinary game made extra ordinary by the defensive blunders of  Blackburn. They made Arsenal looked invincible, going by the scoreline at least. In actual fact I do not think Arsenal played that good. If they play like that against the likes of Man U, City or even Spurs, they cannot even get a draw, let alone a big margin win.

I am no enemy of Arsenal, I really respect Wenger,  but since last season, he has lost the plot. I think about time Arsenal get a new boss. If they do not improve on their flip flop performance, they can say good bye to Champions League yet again. The last night’s 7-1 result really made credible by a poor performance by Blackburn. To make it a more memorable night, the Swans also won.

Unfortunately, I cannot bear tracking Forest’s performance any more. It is still unbelievable they could turn from a Premier League play-off team to a relegation candidate within 8 months. How on earth the board could have chosen this Cotteril guy to be the manager. I still remember how David Platt many moons ago ruined the team. Maybe MUNA should persuade Ah Jib Ghor to get a Malaysian billionaire  to buy over Forest, but then again he is a Red  Devil to the core. Sigh….