One Young World ‘IMPACT’ Report 2011
PROJECT Teach for Malaysia
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Dzameer Dzulkifli, Keeran Sivarajah and their team of 9 people are behind Teach For Malaysia – a not-forprofit organisation that aims to build a different class of leaders who are committed in their pursuit of ending education inequity in Malaysia. According to Dzameer and TeachForMalaysia. org, education inequity is the reality that where a child is born determines the quality of his or her education and life prospects. This goes without saying that the child will be greatly prohibited from fulfilling his or her potential. Job opportunities will be naturally denied from the child as the child has absolutely no chance to be exposed to what higherincome peers are exposed to. This case also goes as far as racial or skin-color discrimination. This is not all. Teach For Malaysia seeks to improve the education quality in Malaysia. According to their website, it is stated that 1 out of every 8 students in Standard 1 classrooms does not meet targeted literacy levels, 1 out of every 4 students in Standard 4 classrooms does not meet targeted numeracy levels, 4 out of 5 working Malaysians are only educated up to SPM level, and 3 out of 5 heads of poor households in Malaysia only have a primary education or less. For the above reasons,
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AIM To build a different class of leaders who are committed in their pursuit of ending education inequity in Malaysia.
Teach For Malaysia believes that the solution to improving Malaysia’s education quality and curbing education inequality lies in the hands of the future leaders. As such, Teach For Malaysia seeks to identify, select and train fifty of Malaysia’s most promising future leaders from various academic backgrounds to be inspirational and transformational teachers and leaders in high-need schools beginning from January 2012. They have received strong support from large corporations in Malaysia, obtained the Ministry of Education’s buy-in to collaborate with Teach For Malaysia and secured the Deputy Prime Minister’s endorsement to launch the programme in December 2010. Youths have the advantage of inexperience that grants them the capability to solve today’s challenges with tomorrow’s logic. They, at Teach For Malaysia, seek to harness that capability in our youths in ensuring that one day, all children in Malaysia will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education. To date, they have reached out to 30 universities in 4 countries - Malaysia, United Kingdom, America and Australia. Dzameer invites those who share the same passion to contact Teach For Malaysia. He ended by asking, “What can WE do to end education inequality?”•