Teachers and KPLI programme

Teacher is a professional who is liked by the people of Malaysia. People already know that the teaching profession is a very noble profession and in our own country, teachers are seen as such a precious and invaluable. But, today there are many issues related to the teacher or education system in our country. Recently, there was debate about KPLI teachers where there are few community disputes especially towards quality of them.

Kursus Perguruan Lepasan Ijazah (KPLI) is one of the programmes that offered education programme to students who already had a degree in certain area such as business, engineering, management and so on. This programme is to prepare them to be a teacher in primary school. According to Santhi (2009), this programme was a fast track programme where the students can finished their study after one year. Besides, this programme was introduced since 3 January 2003 by Ministry of Education (MOE) to achieve Government’s Policy which is to produce at least fifty percent of primary teachers have degree holders in 2010. This programme already produced thousands of graduate primary secondary teachers every year.

Since today, the KPLI programme already has reached eight years of operation. But there are still parties like parents, teachers, senior teachers, and society who not satisfied with the quality of the KPLI teachers. From the surveys had been done by Teacher Training Institutes towards the quality of KPLI teachers stated that KPLI teachers had poor quality in their teaching because of the KPLI programme was too short. Within one year of their study there was not enough for them to achieve the appropriate level as skills, knowledge and school based experience in curricula, co-curricular, self and national development aspect. Besides the quality issue, there are various issues that arise from KPLI teachers/students such as allowance, salary, lecturer, budget from government, curriculum aspect, and etc.

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ISSUES

As we know, the KPLI students will get the allowance for more than a thousand ringgit every month. If we can compared with the students who take four years of education courses where they forced to borrow the money from Perbadanan Tabung Pendidikan Tinggi Nasional (PTPTN). is it fair to students who are studying for four years than KPLI students who only study for one year? This issue has arisen since a few years ago. Most of degree education student are not satisfied with government decision and it seem like the government not fair in their education policy itself.