Perak ruler Sultan Nazrin Shah today attributed the recent spate of crimes involving schoolchildren to a failure to decisively and effectively nip issues in the bud.
Sultan Nazrin said it was unfair to politicise the issue or blame the current leadership for the bullying, violence, sexual assault, and even the recent killing committed in schools.
He said society must acknowledge that such “cancerous cells, now grown to a critical stage, began as small ones” and accumulated over time because they were not addressed at an early stage.
“A persistent culture of denial, the inability to acknowledge mistakes, the ego that resists correction and refuses to change, coupled with a tendency to compromise and a lack of courage to take firm corrective action – these are the factors that have allowed the malignancy to spread,” he said when officiating the National Integrity Month in Ipoh.
Sultan Nazrin also said that these incidents, which he described as a humanitarian crisis, underscored the failure of education to instill human values.
He said this failure had resulted in emotional crises and psychological distress.
“We may have long neglected the sacred purpose of education, becoming overly fixated on achieving quantitative key performance indicators at the cost of sacrificing its qualitative values,” he added.
He said education was not only about producing the most intelligent individuals but also nurturing the most humane.
Since achieving independence, he said the country had prioritised education programmes with substantial allocations.
The 2026 budget saw RM66.2 billion allocated to the education ministry, while RM18.6 billion was set aside for the higher education ministry.
“Yet, these figures remain meaningless if the true purpose of education is unfulfilled, if young minds remain empty of values, and if the current educational focus fails to produce thoughtful, morally grounded individuals with a clear sense of purpose,” he said.
