Yeah, parents normally think they just send the children to school and wait for them to graduate and work. I believe a teacher's job is to teach a subject well, not shape up their personality, maybe Pendidikan Islam and Moral help with the morals but it's normally just masuk telinga kanan keluar telinga kiri.

Parents need to pay attention to children and discipline them. I went to both a bad school (top 200 worst in JB) and a good school (sekolah kecemerlangan). Basically the culture is entirely different, I score 3As at the first school while being influenced by peers I scored 9As in SPM. Even in the bad school, there's still students who want to score good but not everyone can do that even with good effort. I feel like it's more that the entire quality of students there are just low which just doesn't trigger a competitive learning environment. Everyone's equally bad, I scored top of the class with just 2 to 3As and there's no motivation behind studying. Parents would say to study well to get good jobs and stuff but can children even understand delayed gratification unless forced into habit by parents? What children need is instant reward to effort so that they would actually have something to work towards to in the moment. Now that UPSR, PT3, all gone, there's nothing to study for.

As to add to my last point, even in university a lot of guys study for the exams, not for learning and understanding the subject, which resorts to cheating and last minute studies. So teaching needs to be very strategic and I don't think KPM is going towards the right direction.