Articles

English, please!

Published by SchoolAdvisor | Feb 20, 2016

English skills correlate strongly with earning potential and also employability. Malaysian employers typically complain about how local graduates cannot speak proper English and cannot communicate well. Graduates from public varsities, they lament, do not do well in the corporate arena, a complaint that continues to raise an interesting debate about whether our schools and our universities prepare our students well for the workplace and therefore the economy.

In 2003, then prime minister Tun Mahathir Mohamad introduced the PPSMI, citing the need for Malaysians to be more competitive in the global economy, effectively equating the promise of greater English proficiency in graduates as the promise of a greater and more booming economy. Often, the success of a system of education is judged on how well it manages to train its citizens with regards to employment.

The policy was changed in 2003 and mathematics and science went back to being taught in Malay, thus creating an ongoing dynamic debate in the public sphere. Science and mathematics in English is one of those things that people hate or love;  you find as many points of view as you find people;. If you ask this question to the young, professional corporate Malaysian, you’ll receive the response that it’s necessary for economic growth – a signal of progress onto an increasingly shared age of economic progress and interconnectibility. If you ask the science/mathematics teacher who’s never taught in English, you’ll receive the response that it’s hard to teach a subject that you have never had any mastery of.

However, the fact remains that learning English may have its benefits – Increased English instruction at lower and higher levels of education alike mean that opportunities for intellectual collaboration with foreign universities, say, can be improved and increased, as can participation within the intellectual discourse of this world be facilitated through the use of English in our academic conversations.

In this world of competition, the English language remains the commonality within the world of corporate discourse, as talent moves from country to country. University admissions offices use English proficiency as a prerequisite for admission, as evidenced by the existence of the Malaysian University English Test (MUET) for Malaysian schools, the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) for British schools, and the Test Of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) – Might we in fact compromise the ability of our children to earn an income and to compete in the developed world if we choose to force them to remain behind in a past in which we adhere – perhaps blindly – to the promise that our national language is what will save the day day after day?

Let us look at this from the perspective not of learning, but rather of intellectual collaboration – Is it not easier for Malaysian researchers and academicians alike to perform cross-cultural intellectual exchange under the banner of a single lingua franca, rather than resorting to asking each other to overcome language barriers? From an international perspective, in which the value of a scientific paper or a work of cultural inquiry is ascertained based on the number of citations that it receives, does not writing a paper in a language that such a small minority of the world understands not diminish the chances that it will remain relevant?

Revamping and reversing a policy to discourage the teaching of mathematics and science in English simply because the previous generation cannot accrue the skills necessary to educate seems unnecessary in the face of the fact that teachers are like any other employee and can therefore be upskilled or replaced; in any job, one has to be flexible and acquire new skills.

Perhaps that’s not the problem. Perhaps the problem is principle, perhaps it is politics. Yet, ‘perhaps’ seems like a rather flimsy thing upon which to predicate the future and subsequently the economy of our children. Signs of the times indicate that the world is moving toward an increasingly anglo-centric society, where English continues to be even more important – Excellence in the Malay language, which appears to be what our leaders seek, does not have to be mutually exclusive with this; and for this reason, private schools will continue to fill the gap which public schools have failed to accommodate.

Granted, our ministers may have the right idea when it comes to wanting Malay to be used in Malaysia – The Malay language is a unique part and parcel of Malaysian heritage, enshrined in the constitution as our official and national languages of discourse alike; death of such a heritage can only be regarded as intellectual heresy of the highest order.

Yet, however, arguments stating that the life of Bahasa Malaysia must come at the expense of mediocrity when it comes to using the English language are akin to arguments that one can only be a nerd or a jock, not both at the same time – It undermines the notion that mastery of both languages is not a far-off fairy tale.