Bumiputera Retailers Organisation vice-president Ameer Ali Mydin, who had asked the ministry to decide on the colour of the socks, said Maszlee should just make a decision on the matter.
“I’m asking because my customers are asking. When the government comes out with an announcement, it has to be comprehensive,” Ameer, who is the managing director of the Mydin hypermarket chain, told FMT.
“It’s not so simple when you’re talking about hundreds of thousands, if not millions of students.”
On Monday, Ameer and local footwear manufacturer and retailer Bata Primavera Sdn Bhd had raised the question of whether the colour of school socks would be changed following the ministry’s decision that students use black shoes instead of white by 2021.
Maszlee said the colour of socks would be decided after discussions with stakeholders.
But Ameer called for a decision on the matter so that the focus could shift to more pressing education issues like the ones raised in Khazanah Research Institute’s (KRI) latest report.
In “The State of Households 2018: Different Realities” report, KRI noted that Malaysian students have three years of schooling which didn’t contribute to their educational achievement. It also noted that Malaysia performed poorly in the Programme for International Student Assessment.
“It’s more important to focus on the substance of our education system than things like the uniform,” Ameer said. “This isn’t an issue we should be wasting time on. Just decide and move on.”
National Parent-Teacher Associations Consultative Council president Mohamad Ali Hassan said it was good that Bata and Ameer had sought clarification as businesses and parents need time to adjust.
“To me, if we’re changing the colour of the shoes, then automatically we should also change the colour of the socks to match the shoes,” he added.
He said the episode should serve as a lesson to policymakers and politicians to think through any policy, including details of its implementation, before making announcements.
“But really, it’s not an important issue. There are bigger issues like improving the command of the English language and modernising how children learn, such as leveraging on tech to focus on. We should really move on from this issue.”