Shame on you Ambiga, Kit Siang!

Shame on you Ambiga, Kit Siang!

Lim Kit Siang had on April 2 voiced out his concern about the declining standard of education in the country, calling it a 'national crisis' and 'as long as the government does not admit that the system is fraught with weaknesses', efforts to raise education standards will fail.

Without assessing it, he puts the blame on the government, the ruling party and of course, our education system.

DAP adviser Lim Kit Siang (pic) said the latest dismal showing by Malaysia's 15-year-olds in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) assessment in which Malaysia ranked 39th out of 44 countries underscored the gravity of the situation.

He said what was even more damaging was the fact that Education Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin did not want to admit that the country was going backwards where education was concerned.

"This is evident when he did not come out and make any comment when the first Pisa results came out last year.

"And if the government continues with this attitude, the only thing that can save our education system is a change in government," Lim told a press conference at Parliament.

The Pisa report is a triennial study conducted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) involving 15-year-old students from 65 participating countries worldwide.

And today, former Bersih chief and a staunch supporter of Pakatan Rakyat, Ambiga Sreenevasan told our institutions of higher learning to start behaving like world-class universities, just because Universiti of Malaya's (UM) did not permit her to speak at its law convention last week.

Claiming it was a ridiculous move by the university, the former Bersih co-chair said UM was setting a bad example by curtailing the rights of students and clamping down on academic freedom.

"This has to stop. We cannot have narrow-minded people up there telling us this. Public institutions of higher learning  should start behaving like world-class universities," she told The Malaysian Insider.

Ambiga, who is the former Bar Council president, was scheduled to speak at the Law Faculty’s Law Career Convention on Public Interest Litigation on March 29.

A student representative said an official letter was sent to the university's deputy vice-chancellor of Student Affairs to seek permission for Ambiga to deliver the lecture on March 25.

The university had initially agreed on condition that there should also be a pro-establishment speaker at the convention to make it more balanced.

However, the approval was retracted with the excuse that Ambiga's lecture was not part of the programme, which was organised by the UM Law Society.

Lim and Ambiga should do some rekindling here - comparing the standard of our universities before and after they were corrupted by waves of political reformation the Opposition and Bersih led for the sake of their leader, Anwar Ibrahim.

When radical politics were injected into the mind of the students, they started to disregard their main objective of enrollment at the respective colleges and universities. Most were attracted to the 'reformist' terminology introduced by Pakatan Rakyat, Bersih and other anti-government NGOs.

They were incited in such a way - to bring down the legitimate government - that they abandoned the objective of studying to its excel by taking to the streets in anti-government protest, passively sharing the opposition sentiment to unseat Barisan Nasional.

They became political fanatics; and they even demonstrated against the government in support of human rights - for all sorts of freedom, including the right of LGBT.

Being a senior politician himself, Lim Kit Siang was not aware of this (or he pretends not knowing). As a senior lawyer, Ambiga fails to distinguish the effect although she has seen how our judiciary also took a blow when lawyers disregard their main duty and joined the 'reformist' groups.

Lim and Ambiga should be ashamed of themselves for contributing to the decline in standard of higher learning. By corrupting our students with radical politics and reformation, their mind is more occupied with non-academic substances.

Why blamed the government when you people are part of the failure? When you start teaching your children profanity, they will grow up, live and die with it!