The State of Education in Malaysia: Homeschool Over Public School

This section will explain certain parts of the article which are divided into five different parts; introduction, literature review, methodology, findings and analysis and lastly, discussion, conclusion and research recommendation. In the introduction, Ray, (2009) stated that the choice of homeschool by the parents is due to the belief of that it is the parents’ responsibility to determine the best form of education for their children. The authors stated that homeschool education is an alternative way of education in Malaysia. Plus, it is new and considered as uncommon.

This research will determine the impact of homeschool to the students and the driving factors of continuous choice of homeschool education in a family. Therefore, the authors had clearly stated three purposes of this study; to study the trend of homeschooling in Malaysia, to study the homeschool drivers of change and perception towards the national education system and to study the future trend of homeschooling in Malaysia by the year of 2025.

In the literature review, the authors had explained the causes or reasons for parents to homeschool their children.

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One of the reasons is they want to educate and monitor their children with their reference. Besides that, according to Rajamony, (2008) five Malaysian families choose to homeschool their children due to the content of the public school curriculum which is not convincing enough and the inefficiency in teaching and learning practice in the mainstream school that is not aligned with the family’s belief. They provided adequate information, evidence and examples. However, the information given was all over the place and it was quite confusing for readers to see the information in a proper flow.

It is better if the authors state the reasons in one same paragraph.

For the methodology, the authors used a quantitative approach which is the survey questionnaire and also qualitative. 30 parents answered the survey questionnaire and four of them were interviewed. In our opinion, both of the approaches used by the authors are appropriate and suitable since from the survey questionnaire, they can identify various data collected from the respondents. Meanwhile, they can get more details such as the family’s background and belief from the interview session with the respondents. Furthermore, the gathered results and answers were synthesized to search the key drivers and these key drivers were used to create and predict the future scenarios of homeschool in Malaysia.

For the findings and analysis part, the components were neatly organized; however, it would be much better if the data from the survey questionnaire were shown in a table form. From the data attained, the authors had identified 12 key drivers, but only two were highlighted. The education syllabus and social problem handling are the key drivers which shape the future of homeschool. The authors managed to predict the three scenarios with three different trends by using the two highlighted key drivers. The first scenario that can be predicted is a decreasing homeschool trend in Malaysia if the government continually upgrades and revises its national education system. The second scenario is a stagnant trend of homeschool in Malaysia where there are two circumstances in this scenario. First one is the high quality of education syllabus, but poor in handling social problems while the other one is with low quality of the syllabus but good at handling social problems. The third one is, an increasing trend of homeschooling in Malaysia due to parents’ impression of the mainstream’s school becomes worst. We do agree with the authors' prediction of the future trend of homeschool in Malaysia because based on the two highlighted key drivers only, we can already predict the future homeschool trend in Malaysia easily. The authors wrapped up the discussion and conclusion well. The first and second objectives are achieved through the quantitative approach. The third objective is achieved through foresight methodologies which are scenario building. They also provided a relevant research recommendation so that the area of study can be expanded in terms of the impact of the performance of homeschoolers compared with the mainstream’s school students by academic performance. Plus, policymaker could regulate on the implementation of the act and give a chance of supervised homeschooling with performance indicator studies to determine the relevancy level of homeschooling in Malaysia so it will create a win-win situation for the government and parents.

To sum up, this article was well written. There was a need for a proper organization in the literature review since some of the information was in to and fro. It is much better if the authors organize the information in a clear sequence. Besides that, the author could improve their organization in the discussion, conclusion and research recommendation by separating into each component respectively. Overall, it was a very interesting, significant contribution to the field of research since we can see the future trend of homeschool by the year 2025.