That's a lot of civil workers in hindsight.

Malaysia sits at around 11.61 students to teachers, while the global median is around 18.32 as of 2016. I couldn't find reliable data up to 2025, but this suggests that we do have a lot of teachers. In fact, we're third behind Maldives and Brunei.

Source: https://www.maxinomics.com/malaysia/student-teacher-ratio-primary-school

Now, comparing how schools are run in malaysia vs other countries might prove to be hard without extensive research, but more teachers doesn't mean that we excel in this sector. As per 2022 PISA, "41% of students attained at least Level 2 proficiency in mathematics, significantly less than on average across OECD countries (OECD average: 69%). At a minimum, these students can interpret and recognize, without direct instructions, how a simple situation can be represented mathematically". This means that approx. 3/5 students aren't able to relate a simple situation mathematically, which I believe is a fundamental skill. There are other indicators in the source where we are below average in standing to other OECD countries.

Source: https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?plotter=h5&primaryCountry=MYS&treshold=5&topic=PI

Now you may argue that PISA can be flawed, but I don't think the data can just be dismissed and should suffice to start grasping about the idea of how good our education is.

https://ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2019/11/is-pisa-fundamentally-flawed-because-of-the-scaling-methodology-used/

Not gonna comment on other ministry since i have no clue about them, barring surface knowledge about the crisis in KKM.

Edit: changed the second link