English Controversy

John Lee is giving a piece of his mind on the government's 180% about turn on the policy of teaching Science and Maths in English. I have taken this from the online newspaper,Malaysian Insider today (10 July). Read on........

The government is selling its move to end the use of English in science and maths classes as a wise decision, for our own good. But that is exactly how it sold the decision to implement the policy of using English in the classroom six years ago. Not coincidentally, in both cases, the government has rushed to a decision, without much apparent forethought. This ad hoc style of policymaking is a horrible basis for running the country, and it is ruining a whole generation of young minds.

I was part of the very first cohort to undergo the switch to English. When I went to Form One from Year Six, we switched over to English in the classroom for science and maths. But our teachers were never entirely comfortable in using English, and had to resort to slipping into Malay to explain something every once in a while.

No wonder: in explaining the decision to go back to Malay, the government tells us that not even 20 per cent of science and maths teachers are capable of using English in the classroom. Well, pardon my French, but in America we have a term for that: “No shit, Sherlock.” Hasn’t this been obvious all along? Hasn’t this information always been out there? Did the government need to wait six years to find out its teachers cannot teach in English?

Now the government is taking measures to rectify our poor command of English by revamping the English curriculum. This is far too little, far too late. Isn’t the problem of poor English exactly what the government was trying to solve six years ago, when it announced this policy it is now rolling back? Why did the government not hire more teachers and revamp the curriculum six years ago, when that is exactly what everyone was telling them to do?

The government’s six-year experiment in failure is completely inexcusable. The government knew its teachers were not capable of teaching in English, but instead of retraining them to teach in English, it forced them into doing it in spite of their clear inability to teach properly —and it continued to do this for six irresponsible years. And this policy was not necessarily doomed to failure; after all, when you have capable teachers in the classroom, as the mission schools of yesteryear did, pupils readily learned the subject matter even if it was in English — my father and his whole generation are a testament to the viability of the policy.

The government has nobody else to blame but itself for this abject failure. And now instead of addressing the obvious problem — the problem of teachers’ fluency in English — the government is dropping that problem altogether. Surely the goal should be to ensure that at some point we have science and maths teachers capable of using English? If our own teachers cannot pass an English exam, why should any of their students pass their English exams?

The government’s constant, poorly-thought-out flip-flopping on this issue is ridiculous, and it is wasting the minds of thousands of Malaysian schoolchildren as they go back and forth between English and Malay. In a few years time, when some new education minister figures out that maybe we can retrain teachers to use English effectively, and then orders a complete changeover again, another generation of students will suffer. This flip-flopping is ridiculous and harmful.

There are viable compromises which the government should have pursued before rushing headlong into a 100 per cent English policy — compromises which the government can still pursue instead of rushing blindly back into a 100 per cent Malay/mother tongue policy. The most obvious one is to teach in the mother tongue at the primary level, and teach in English at the secondary level, which is what many expected the government to do. This split makes sense, since students should be capable of learning in English after six years of exposure in primary school.

The problem with this is that it does not go far enough, because it is still a one-size-fits-all policy. For quite a while, including in this column, I have been suggesting that the government allow individual schools to decide whether and when to implement the mother tongue or English as the medium of instruction. After all, in some urban areas, everyone, from the teachers to the students, is capable of using English, so if they want to, why not just let them do it right from Year One? (We already have all the textbooks and supplementary materials necessary for this anyway!) Meanwhile, in some rural areas, the English instruction might be so hopeless that the students still cannot use English in the classroom — so why force it on them when they enter secondary school? Letting the schools decide is vital, because it personalises the education system to the needs of individual communities.

We don’t expect everyone to buy the same kind of car, eat the same kind of food, or live in the same kind of house. So why do we expect everyone to learn at exactly the same pace, in exactly the same language? In a country as diverse as ours, it is ridiculous for the government to enforce a strict, no-exceptions regulation on something as important as learning.

I was not aware until yesterday that the Opposition (DAP) is putting forward this idea of autonomy: they want urban schools to be given a choice about which languages to use. I believe this is the best possible compromise at this point, and the one that makes the most sense.

The government has been completely reckless and irresponsible in its policy-making here. When so many of our teachers were plainly incapable of using English, they rammed through the policy of teaching in English. Now, millions of ringgit and six years later, the government finally acknowledges that it did not properly prepare teachers to teach in English, and completely undoes the policy, without a thought for the affected students. This is irresponsibility of the highest order, and it has been completely pointless. If the government wants to salvage the situation now, there is still a chance for it to do the right thing: don’t just focus on improving the English curriculum. Focus on training our teachers properly, and focus on giving our schools the freedom they need to teach.