AS the headline of this week’s column says, we reap what we sow. This is the conclusion I arrived at after reading strongly-worded remarks from three prominent Malaysians on what I call the “English deficit” among most Malaysians, especially the younger generation born in the past few decades.
Umno veteran Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah said he was shocked when he found out that many civil servants today could not write proper English.
“A lot of our people, even in the civil service, cannot even write a simple letter. I am very embarrassed. I can only point out that it is education that is pulling us back. Who suffers? The whole country,” said Tengku Razaleigh, who is better known as Ku Li.
In the past, Malaysians were known for their English language skills and were the ones who drafted important statements at international conferences.
“I went to a lot of international conferences. Before, as we all could speak English well, they always called us. Not the Indonesians, not even the Filipinos who speak English all the time.
“They’d rather have us draft communiques and press statements or sit in caucuses and mini conferences. We Malaysians were always singled out. But now nobody wants us, because we can’t even write, and with what is written, we can’t even read!,” he said.
Ku Li went on to say that many neighbouring countries have done better, thus leaving Malaysia behind, and this reflects badly on us, and because of the “lack of education, we are unable to catch up”.
Former Cabinet minister Tan Sri Rafidah Aziz said Malaysians only stand to lose out if there is no focus on mastering English. She said in the current political climate, some leaders are clamouring for Bahasa Malaysia to be empowered, and making it compulsory even for foreign students in the country to learn the national language.
“We should not be doing this, we are only going to be at a loss,” Rafidah, who is chairman of the Safety Review Board of AirAsia X, cited the aviation industry, where English is the main language, as an example.
“I have come across cases of communication problems between the control tower and pilots. All because the person at the control tower had poor command of English,” she said.
She pointed out that Malaysia should not go backward with “misplaced nationalism”, as English is the recognised international language.
Tan Sri Azman Hashim, one of Malaysia’s top bankers, chipped in on the same issue, saying that the vital ingredient, especially for graduates to excel, is proficiency in English.
“I know it is a sensitive subject. We have gone backwards,” he told graduates of University Malaysia Sabah recently, of which he is the Chancellor.
He said Malaysians today were too shy to speak English, and the system is to blame for it, adding that the private sector will not take people who are not proficient in English, which is recognised as the international language by as many as 80% of countries in the world.
Azman said in China, English is widely used in signboards, and so too in the Saudi Arabian city of Madinah.
I have read news reports that in some parts of China, even football stadiums are being used to teach English to meet the high demand for learning English, as China is well on its way to becoming the world’s No.1 economy.
The AmBank Group chairman lamented the low standard of proficiency among teachers teaching English in public schools throughout the country, a fact even admitted by the Education Ministry, which said that most teachers have failed in their assessment. However, the saving grace is that English is the medium of instruction in private universities and colleges, which have been mushrooming over the years.
As mentioned at the outset, we are just reaping what we sow with the public-funded education system that has sidelined English since the mid-1970’s. So, how do we expect Malaysians to master the language, both spoken and written?
“English is a beautiful language and students should be passionate in learning it,” said Azman.
What is certain is that if we ask students on this critical issue, their standard response would be that they are just the product of the English-unfriendly education, which the country’s past political leaders had chosen for them to go through.
The English deficit that Malaysia is suffering from is another reason why we have a serious graduate unemployment problem. But with English proficiency, the graduates’ employability will increase significantly.
Graduate unemployment is multiplying with so many public universities cropping up in practically all states in the country, where the medium of instruction is not English, and where the language is hardly spoken in classrooms among students. To master any language for that matter, one has to start by speaking the language.
Generally, Malaysian job-seekers’ biggest fear at job interviews is when the potential employers ask them questions in English to test their command of the language, which is required in their job specifications. They usually struggle to speak, and in my lifelong profession of journalism, where being biligual is essential, I have had more than my fair share of accepting the reality of the situation.
The effect of this is that for media outlets like news agencies, news portals and newspapers, we can find that many of those editing the English texts are people past their retirement age, and they are retained in order to maintain some respectable standard of service. In other words, they become indispensable for as long as they are able to perform. And this does not augur well for the future sustainability of these news organisations.
The most critical question, even if there is a political will to fix this deficit (there is none so far), is: Where are the teachers to be sourced from? It is public knowledge that those who become teachers in the country are from national schools, which are acutely short of competent English language teachers, to begin with. And this was admitted by the ministry recently.
The situation is even more alarming in rural schools. Some netizens have suggested that to improve the quality of education, Malaysia could recruit well-trained teachers from some English-speaking countries.
I would rather propose that foreign English teachers become trainers to significantly increase the number of our own trainers in the language, as a long-term plan to address the issue. With a fairly good and sufficient number of such teachers, we could perhaps introduce a dual system of having Bahasa Malaysia and English as the co-medium of instruction in future to boost the quality of education and our human resource.
Singapore founding prime minister, the late Lee Kuan Yew, was always consistent when asked what is the secret of Singapore’s phenomenal success despite being a nation without any natural resources. Lee attributed it to his decision to retain English as the medium of instruction in its education system. Singapore’s human resource quality is consistently rated as among the top in the world.
We need to avoid a repeat of the fiasco in our plan or rather experiment to teach Science and Mathematics in English that was introduced in early 2000. Though the objective was noble, it was doomed to fail because when the country did not even have enough competent teachers to impart English proficiency per se, how could they teach the difficult subjects of Science and Mathematics in English?
During the years when this was implemented, students found it traumatic learning these two technical subjects – and teachers as well – and the programme was abandoned some years later after resources worth some billions had been invested.
Whenever I spoke with Maha Sinnathamby, the Malaysian-born property entrepreneur behind the Greater Springfield development in Queensland, the largest master-planned community in Australia, he always reminded me of how important it is for any nation to get its act right on education.
“Education is something that nobody can steal from you, and it is the currency that can be exchanged anywhere in the world,” said Sinnathamby, who is now rated as one of his adopted country’s richest men.
So let all stakeholders, particularly the government, get our priorities right in education to lift the nation from its English doldrums.
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