An opposition leader has asked Deputy Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak whether his decision to send his children to international schools signalled a lack of confidence in the national education system.

DAP chairperson Lim Kit Siang raised the issue today after reading in newspapers that two of Najib's teenage children are students of the Garden International School in Kuala Lumpur.

Garden International, a private school, educates its students according to the national curriculum of the United Kingdom. Students are also required to sit for school leaving examinations conducted by the Cambridge examination board.

Lim said the revelation deserves greater scrutiny in view of a recent call by Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi for an "education revolution" to address the lack of employability of local graduates.

"What 'education revolution' is Malaysia undertaking when the new DPM has no confidence in the national education system as he does not send his own children to national school?" he said.

According to Lim, a greater irony is the fact that Najib himself had once served on the cabinet as education minister between 1995 and 1999.

"Can all the cabinet ministers, deputy ministers, parliamentary secretaries and members of parliament who have no confidence in the national education system step forward to identify themselves?" he rapped.

New minister, please

On the state of the national education system, Lim said the government would have to be sincere in addressing the shortcomings of the system and not try to defend failures of the current policy.

He said an example of this was when Education Minister Musa Mohamad told reporters yesterday that Abdullah's call for an "education revolution" was "more of a reminder to the Education Ministry to continue its present efforts to improve the education system".

"Musa even sought to explain away Abdullah's call by claiming that the national education system had been in the throes of a revolution not only in the past four years but for the past decade," he said.

Lim said Musa's response showed that in order for Abdullah to fulfill his promise to revamp the education system, the premier should first appoint a new education minister.

Meanwhile, the DAP leader also called on Abdullah to renew efforts to improve the standard of local universities to the prominence they once enjoyed.

"In the 60s, there was no dispute that the University of Malaya (UM) belonged to the top international league of universities but although it is still regarded as the cream of local universities, it is no more recognised as belonging to the international cream of universities," he said.

To illustrate, Lim said a survey conducted by the now-defunct Asiaweek magazine in 2000 placed UM at the "lowly and humiliating position of 44 out of 77 Asian universities. Asiaweek first carried out the survey in 1997 when it ranked UM 11th place.

In addition, he said the government should also heed the warning by local academicians that mediocre standards in universities may be the cause of the high number of "unemployable graduates" joining the labour pool each year.