Posted in Education, Science & technology on October 29th, 2012 3 Comments »
I am partial to an education system which has the English language as its medium of instruction. That is because I am most comfortable where English is the primary and the common language. While the Malay language is my mother tongue, I mostly use English to run both my private and professional life. For a [...]
Posted in Economics, Education on May 8th, 2012 1 Comment »
Social mobility is crucial to the maintenance of a healthy liberal society. Inflexibility will have elites entrenched within the state apparatus and eventually becoming de facto dictators themselves, unless there is some sense of altruism among the elites. The monopoly of power itself is illiberal in so many ways. There are ways to address the [...]
Posted in Education on January 14th, 2012 1 Comment »
Ninety-three percent. The Malaysian literacy rate in 2009 was 93%, so says the United Nations Development Program in its latest Human Development Index report. But was it really? I began to question the UNDP finding after reading a newspaper report that 8% of the National Service trainees are illiterate. It becomes worrying after one considers [...]
Posted in Education on October 31st, 2011 3 Comments »
The Parent Action Group for Education (PAGE) is a group known for its strong support for the teaching of science and mathematics in English in Malaysian public schools (the PPSMI policy). Its chairperson Noor Azimah Abdul Rahim argues the serial improvement seen throughout the years of PPSMI is a proof of success. They argue that [...]
Posted in Economics, Education, Politics & government on October 9th, 2011 3 Comments »
The government intends to give corporations double deduction for sponsoring students. While it is great to encourage the private sector to give out scholarships to students so that there are fewer reasons for government to do so, I think the double deduction is a bad idea. There two reasons. First, I am with the idea [...]
Posted in Books & printed materials, Education, Fiction on September 4th, 2011 No Comments »
He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kitten to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly—yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes [...]
Posted in Education, Society on February 17th, 2011 3 Comments »
Prejudice against any group depends on generalization for it to take root successfully in one’s mind. Although I have to admit that sometimes there are voices in my head whispering ethnic prejudice and stereotype, I typically find it hard to harbor such sentiment for long. I have friends of ethnicities different from mine. If I [...]
Posted in Economics, Education on December 3rd, 2010 No Comments »
Although normatively one should not judge a book by its cover, positively, first impression matters. The first few lessons in economics are likely to affect a person’s perspective on the roles of government. Those who are familiar with economics and who ended up skeptical with the concept of activist government have to suffer those first [...]
Posted in Economics, Education on November 24th, 2010 No Comments »
Not all borrowers are the same. Some are goods borrowers who repay their loans mostly on time. Others do not. Under typical market operations, the good borrowers get to pay lower rates as compared to the bad ones. This mitigate the risk of default and it discourages too many bad borrowers from borrowing. If everybody [...]
Posted in Economics, Education on November 14th, 2010 1 Comment »
The Malaysian government-setup National Higher Education Fund Corporation (PTPTN) is apparently in trouble. It finds itself in a big fiscal hole. With a mandate to provide Malaysian students at local tertiary institutions with cheap source of education financing, PTPTN lends at 1% to students but borrows at much higher rates from financial institutions, according to [...]
The name is Hafiz Noor Shams.
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