For our Children

Education is basic human rights to me. Without education, there will be no improvement from generations to generations. Nations cannot be improved and mentality of the people will be stagnant. It is commendable that Malaysia has been giving compulsory free primary education for many decades.

However, the current education system that we have in this country is not in an encouraging state. Our government had changed policies so often that even the teachers are confused. We as parents are also worried. My eldest son learns Science and Maths in English but unfortunately, his brother, who is 1 year younger, is learning it in BM. If given a choice, I would rather the teaching and learning of Science and Maths in English continues. I have signed the petition online in favour of maintaining the teaching and learning of Science and Mathematics in English (PPSMI) in schools. For parents who feel the same way, do go sign the petition.

Make no mistake, I am not in any way disrespecting BM as the national language. BM, as I have said before, is a beautiful language that I am proud to be able to speak fluently in (not so much in writing due to lack of practice). But like it or not English in the language of businesses in Malaysia. We encourage foreign investors to come to our country, surely they would not be interested if the locals are not able to converse well in English. Unless you are not going to be an employee (and a good one at that), you cannot run away from good spoken and written English.

I recently conducted interviews for 3 positions and I was shocked that many of the candidates cannot even speak well in English. Most of them are from places other that Klang Valley. Even with a public college diploma, they struggle to speak a full sentence in English. It was painful to be in the interview panel, I wanted to ask them to speak in BM instead to make it less painful for the candidate and myself. But that of course that would not be acceptable to the rest of the panel. After all, we are in a British University! So needless to say those who were not proficient in English were eliminated. So tell me English is not important. There are a lot of argument in the internet of people opposing the wide use of English in local education citing Japan and Germany as examples. Unfortunately, we are far far  away in terms of development from any of those countries. It is to our own disadvantage (as a country) if we do not make English as important as BM.

For me, it is highly possible to master 2 or more languages for any average person. So make both English and BM equally important. A third language is also possible to master, e.g. mandarin or tamil. If we start the kids with these languages from young, they will be proficient in all of them.

For the record, I am also not supportive of the many different types of schools that we have, there should be only one type of school for all. And for goodness sake, increase the salaries of teachers and produce high quality teachers. Make it a profession of high esteem. We are placing the future of our children in them (of course parents also play important roles), so they should deserve nothing less! If I were to be a politician, I would make that something I will fight for.

We are really in need for strong and firm education policies which are developed by experts in this field and not politicians whose priorities are not in line with the people such as parents like me. I do hope we will get the correct country leaders who can see the problems we are having with the present education system which has been getting from bad to worse. Look at University Malaya, my alma mater, which standards have been spiraling down due to many reasons.

I hope things will change soon so that my kids will not need to suffer the bad quality of local education for the next 10 to 20 years to come.