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How To Be Fluent In English By Not Studying It

The Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, decrees English must return to the curriculum. The deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, demands that civil servants be proficient in English. The education minister, Tan Sri Musa Mohamed, demands schools teach English. The UMNO Supreme Council demands only science and mathematics be taught in English. The education ministry is confused. The teachers are confused. The parents and confused. The students are confused. The country is split between those, who like Dr Mahathir, want the medium of teaching to switch from Malay to English, those do not want English, and those who want a fully bilingual education system. The issue is intensely political. No one looks seriously how the Mahathirian diktat could be policy. It does not surprise then that they shoot themselves in the foot everytime they open their mouths.

Dr Mahathir must take the blame for English disappearing from the curriculum. He was amongst those who egged the then education minister, Dato' (now Tun) Abdul Rahman Yaakub, to discard it without cabinet approval. He had been expelled from UMNO two years earlier, and was rehabilitated after Tun Abdul Razak succeeded Tengku Abdul Rahman as prime minister. He decided his path to power was on the backs of the Malay language fanatics. When he became education minister after the 1974 general elections, he made the disappearance of English from the curriculum a priority. It was he who insisted in 1975 English be taught to communicate, not as a language of diplomacy and commerce. Students were taught an Esperanto English, which a generation later makes no sense. Grammar and Shakespeare did not not figure in the teaching of English. More so in science and mathematics.

Why does he want English to return to the prominence it once had? His reasons do not convince. He does not say why he wants English. Even if many Malaysian diplomats now could not speak English fluently to save their lives. As he did not say why he removed in the 1970s. He wanted English removed to punish the non-Malay so he could be disadvantaged. It did not work that way. The Malay followed the national education policy and ignored English; the non-Malay studied English privately to be proficient in English as in Malay. The Malay would not learn it. He did not have to. He was protected through school and university with jobs promised at the end of it all.

More important, it made him, in his mind, inferior in public life; this egged him the harder to circumscribe the non-Malay. This failed. And ingrained the inferiority in his persona. PAS's hudud laws in Trengganu is one attempt to show the non-Malay the Malay is still in control. Having handicapped themselves so thoroughly, the Malay attempt to handicap the non-Malay backfired. The non-Malay, by and large, decided English was too important to be ignored, and studied it privately. And he learned it as one should: as a language. The Malay elite studied English the same way. As English became the language of globalisation and modern commerce, Malaysia lagged behind. Horror stories abound, the largely non-Malay private sector holding their ground, the Malay public sector all but surrendering the ghost.

Thirty years on, the Malay is even more handicapped than after the 13 May 1969 riots. The non-Malay adjusts on his own to survive in a country where public policy is hobble him. The Malay, after his initial success, found he could not survive in a competitive society. It is one thing to have ill-educated members of a highly politicised civil service, another to have them represent the country in sensitive negotiations with foreign countries and organisations. Especially under a prime minister whose foreign policy in his 21 years in office was to make him look good to foreign nations. This personality of the cult survived in the first decade and a half because civil servants and diplomats selected for their competence were around. Many of them have disappeared, and their successors are caught in the trap the prime minister set as education minister. In a decade, if drastic measures are not now taken, we would be the laughing stock of the region. Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai and Laotian diplomats already speak better English than Malaysian diplomats. The crunch would come in a decade when the last of pre-1969 civil servant would have retired.

It was also disastrous for UMNO and its hold on the Malay ground. The Malay, even the most committed, is as likely to switch to PAS as remain in UMNO. It is worse now. A large section of Malays desert UMNO for a cultural hurt it and its president committed against its once prime-minister-in-waiting. UMNO's multiracial worldview drifts to a monoracial monoreligious theocratic existence. The Anwar Ibrahim affair forced this drift, but it had no choice but to be more extreme than PAS to retain the support it now has. PAS, as a unawowedly theocratic party, is better placed than UMNO ever could in this fight for a theocratic Malaysia. The leaders after Dr Mahathir find this untenable.

Dr Mahathir brought English back as a quick fix. But introduced it confrontationally. He decided it was and that could not be challenged. UMNO did. He stomached it, but went on the offensive. He should have introduced it gradually and in stages so that in a generation it would be back in the education system. But he is unclear why English is important in Malaysia. He attacks PAS for backing the continued use of Malay when it wants Malay rights and privileges abrogated if they come into power! There is no link, in this context, between Malay language and Malay rights. One does not know why he did it, but it politicised the policy even more, and even more likely not to succeed. In fact, his policy and how he intends to apply it guarantees its disappearance. The Malay is not impressed with his plans.

As it stands, bringing English back into the classroom would not make a difference. Unless it is as a language and not as Esperanto. The subtleties of the modern world requires the study of the language as it should be taught, not in the highly politicised form Dr Mahathir introduced. English as is taught cannot make one proficient in the subtleties and nuances of diplomacy, politics, commerce. For that, the inbuilt policy of damning the non-Malay to strengthen the Malay must be set aside. The civil service and the public service cannot be run as an institution controlled by one race. That it is adds to the problems it faces. The Malay mistakes molly codding as meritocracy. Promotions are, by and large, to the unfit and the unqualified. This could be resolved only by changing the mindset dramatically, and the civil and public services opened to the best brains there is. More than not speaking English must first be resolved. This UMNO and Dr Mahathir cannot. Even if they want to. So larger policy failures could be swept under the carpet.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@mgg.pc.my