An express lane for the intelligent

AT THE tender age of seven, did you feel more intelligent that the boy sitting next to you in school? Whether you did or not, there was an attempt in the 1960s to push the more intelligent ones – or the pupils perceived to be more intelligent – more quickly through their primary education. A development arising from the Rahman Talib Report was the concept of express classes “for more intelligent children to complete their primary education in five years instead of six.” (The Straits Times, 14 January 1962) A Unesco paper in 1973, titled “The educational statistics system of Malaysia 1972”, gave more information:

At the beginning of the second year in a large primary school, the more intelligent pupils are placed in the express class based on their performance in the previous year, the recommendation of their class teachers and the approval of the parents concerned. They will remain in such class until they complete the remaining part of the primary education in the next four years thereby completing the primary education in five years instead of six. Prior approval of the Chief Education Officer must be sought whenever a Head of School wishes to start an express class. Express classes exist in a number of large primary schools and statistics on them are regularly collected. In 1971, the number of Express classes in West Malaysia was 98 classes with 3,835 pupils.

The pioneering Standard Two Express class
at Westlands School in 1962.

Thus in 1962, an express class was introduced into Standard Two in Westlands School. Ironically, many of my friends who were streamed into the first Standard Two Express simply had no idea why we had been so chosen. Guinea pigs, we turned out to be. Or whether our parents had been informed at the very least. Were we really that more intelligent that the rest of our classmates who did not go into the express class? On what basis were we chosen? Even the old teachers that we spoke to could not recall the criteria of selection. If I could remember correctly, one told me recently, each class in Standard One in 1961 were requested to pick their five best pupils to go to the express class the following year.

(As a footnote, perhaps I WAS a wee bit more intelligent at my young age after all. I do remember that in 1964, the school introduced an Intelligence Test for the first time in its history. Everyone took the test and to my surprise, I scored the highest marks among my peers, not only in the class but in the whole of Standard Five. But no prize was forthcoming for me, unfortunately. The school offered no prize for this test. Darn. The very first and only time I ever came out tops among the boys in any test and I got no prize, no recognition. Ha ha... 😜)

I have no idea how long the original Standard Two express classes lasted in the Malaysian education system. Contrary to the Unesco report I mentioned earlier, it was suggested in an academic paper, “The identification of gifted and talented students” by Siti Fatimah Mohd Yassin, Noriah Mohd Ishak, Melor Mohd Yunus and Rosadah Abd Majid, published in 2012, that the programme ended in 1970. I have also seen a short report in The Straits Times of 26 July 1968 that the Minister of Education, Mohammed Khir Johari, had wanted the express classes to be discontinued from 1969. The system was not good enough, he had felt. There were varying standards in different schools and he claimed that the pupils were admitted to express classes at the discretion of teachers and headmaster only.

Neither was this the only experimentation by the Ministry of Education. According to Abu Yazid bin Abu Bakar from the Faculty of Education, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, the Ministry of Education had intermittently introduced such express class programmes for pupils with high academic potential over a period of three decades (1960s through 1990s). In his paper, “Developing gifted and talented education program: The Malaysian experience” published in Jan 2017, he wrote that the express classes in 1962 gave such pupils the opportunity to accelerate their elementary education. “Likewise,” he added, “the Level One Assessment System in 1996 was a similar acceleration effort to shorten the elementary education of academically talented pupils. However, all these transformational efforts to develop programmes specifically tailored for gifted and talented pupils were short-lived due to factors such as lack of instructions, training, leadership and resources.”

© Quah Seng Sun