The Education of the Malay/Muslims: Sustaining the 'Catch-Up' Process

The concern with not comparing the educational performance of the Malays with other communities is that the competitive mentality, the urgency and intense commitment which can be elicited by the process of catching up with leading communities are absent. It is hard to make the case that seeing how well one is doing from one’s own starting point would help to inculcate the values that would help boost performance. Malay leaders, like the late former President of the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (MUIS) and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of MENDAKI, Mr Ridzwan Dzafir, had asked the Malays to relish competition.

In an interview with The Straits Times as reported in March 2010, while acknowledging the progress made by

the community, he noted wistfully that the Malays can do much more to narrow the gap with other races in areas like education and skills one.”

He said: “We must be more ambitious, more competitive, just like our forefathers who were migrants.”

How It Should Be Done

In other areas, for instance the economic one, catch-up occurs when following nations learn and adopt models or policies that led to the success of the leading nations, and the process ceases when the knowledge discrepancy between the leading and following nations becomes very small and eventually exhausted.

Singapore, as one of the East Asian Tigers, achieved developed economy status – along with the likes of Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea – despite emerging from a region comprising predominantly of countries that to date remain developing economies. What probably helped was the standards used to benchmark its economic progress: those of developed economies or leading cities, which mainly are the more distant Western ones. Alluding to Mr Lee’s speech, these too are a sort of “moving target”. It is worth noting that, in the economics literature, there is scarce evidence that catch-up occurred with developing economies using their own starting points as benchmarks.

The economic analogy has some degree of relevance to education because, as with uplifting educational attainments, it too has to deal with the human and social attitudes and the contemporary challenges in the catch-up process. It can be argued that benchmarking educational progress against that of other communities that are leading remains relevant if the historical, sociological and policy factors are factored into consideration. For example, in PSLE Standard Mathematics, while there has been progress over the 30-year period as shown in Chart 1, the widening gap between the Malays and other communities does provide some information which would be perilous to ignore.

Another example is the stark contrast between the performances of Malay pupils in PSLE Standard Science and that of other communities. Not only is there an overall decline over the 30-year period but also a jarring gap between the attainments of the Malays and other communities, which tended to widen post-2000.

Neglecting the widening disparities between the Malays and other communities, as are observable in both charts (particularly from 2000 onwards), can have implications on the resolve to arrest the slides. Inculcating the catch-up mentality requires a certain level of anxiety to be created, as the two charts above are capable of. The same effect cannot be produced if a chart depicting only the community’s progress is shown. The comparison with leading communities also helps the lagging community to visualise where it ought to be.

Taking a Micro View of the Catch-Up Process

The challenge in catching up stems mainly from oversimplifying the possible causes of the lag. Leaders often speak of the need for mindset change, which can be problematic because it tends to downplay the significance that structural factors constitute in impeding progress in the education and social spheres. A student from a dysfunctional family may need time to level up with her peers. Before she could catch up, streaming in school, which occurs at an early age, gets in her way, lumping her in the lower stream together with other students ranging from underperformers to late-bloomers to the hands-on oriented. It further strains her coping mechanism: the stigma, a longer pathway and the lack of networks with better performing students in higher streams. In such an instance, catch-up can be better facilitated if the complexity of her situation and her strengths are recognised: she may be a bright student who is underperforming because of the less-than-favourable conditions which deprive her of time, networks and a conducive space for her schoolwork. As the participant pointed out, educational performance should not be seen as a “standalone” issue but in relation with other social realities with which it is closely intertwined.

At the community level, a more nuanced approach to facilitating catch-up is needed. The lagging community’s self-help organisations should seek to differentiate its programmes and schemes from those offered by schools and government agencies so that they address unmet needs. This is probably best achieved if the self-help organisations work in partnership with the public and even private sectors to deliver their services. For example, if they offer tuition programmes, rather than provide those that replicate the school classroom or its learning support programmes or private tuition centres, they may wish to collaborate with schools and private tuition centres so that their resources can be channelled towards identifying and bridging the gaps, thus fulfilling unmet needs. Alternatively, they can focus on improving their outreach strategies as many students from low-income families tend to miss out on available education schemes or are plagued by absenteeism problems.

Challenges in Catching Up

The path to catching up is riddled with challenges. When comparing with leading communities, it is worth acknowledging the factors that contribute to the leading community’s socioeconomic position. Taking another minority community as an example – namely, the Indian community – one can argue that figures on the performance of the Indian community in education are enhanced to a noteworthy extent by immigrants from India, many of whom in recent times are better educated professionals and entrepreneurs. In the span of 20 years between 1997 and 2017, the share of Indians in the resident population rose from 7.6% to 9.0% (while that for Malays declined from 13.9% to 13.4%). In contrast, such immigration has barely taken place in the Malay community.

PM Lee said in his Malay speech of National Day Rally 2010 that it is not easy to attract Malay or pribumi talent from Southeast Asia but the government will continue to try. The inflow of talent and wealth that the Indian community enjoys, and similar advantages enjoyed by other communities, is hard for the Malay community to reproduce, thus putting a damper on the catch-up process. Nor can this issue be addressed simply by harping on mindset change. While government policies cannot favour any ethnic group, the Malay community can flag the class-based issues within it. The ongoing national concern with social class divide, as the Institute of Policy Studies' (IPS) study on social capital found, and which has also been discussed by academics, most notably in the book by Nanyang Technological University (NTU) academic Teo You Yenn, This is What Inequality Looks Like, presents an opportunity for rigorous discussion that hopefully would lead to policies aimed at further levelling the playing field, thus accelerating the catch-up process.

The future is likely to see radical shifts in the social and economic realities in Singapore. There are some developments that a lagging community can capitalise on: the lesser emphasis on grades and more on skills and talent development, the broadening of the definition of success, the challenge mounted against elitism, and the disruption that will permeate job markets as technology advances, which may be scary but may also be the panacea for job woes as it offers a whole new range of possibilities. Whatever the circumstances may turn out to be, the lagging community should not lose sight of its goal of catching up and continue to build on the efforts made over the last three decades.