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So The Final Proposals on English Is Not Final

Malaysia's super-efficient, all-knowing, all-seeing Cabinet decrees, without the usual unaccustomed thought and consideration, that English be introduced into the curriculum. The UMNO supreme council would have none of it, when the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, appraised it of it. You may teach science and mathematics, it told him, in English. No more no less. Since it is more important than the Cabinet, he immediately amends the policy and runs into a political storm. The Malay, Chinese and Tamils schools do not want it. It was originally for the national (Malay) schools, and extended to the national-type (Chinese and Tamil) schools. The government could not face the flak, and threatened to detain without trial those who opposed the policy. Then cracks appeared in the government's own ranks. The Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) and Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia (Gerakan) both had doubts, one prepared to disuss it the other outrightly rejecting it. It is self-evident now the National Front government's component partners were not consulted.

So as any major policy, it is revised, altered, rethought, amended after it is announced. It is axiomatic that every major policy announced is a draft. The government thinks it is not. But it is. The is the norm. What else can you expect when the government does not consult those directly involved or work to a consensus. Once before any law was passed, a parliamentary committee invited the public was invited to air their views by letter or in person. Now the first the public hears of it is when it is announced as the proverbial bombshell. And accused of treason if it objects. But cracks show soon enough, the draft is revised. There is hardly a law or policy that is rushed and implemented in haste and ill-thought. When it must go through Parliament, it is rushed through on a certificate of urgency and the draft of the law given to MPs half an hour before before the debate starts.

So when the Prime Minister announced yesterday (18 August 2002) the Cabinet would now amend the policy after studying why the original is flawed. It lost its case when it could not defend it, and threatened detention without trial to the naysayers. More so when the MCA and Gerakan broke ranks. It turns out, as often, a Malay diktat to rein the non-Malays in. The issue is not teaching English per se, but in the underlying political dog-in-the-manger mindset to hobble the non-Malay. The deputy education minister, Dato' Aziz Shamsuddin, reflects it, as Malay newspapers report today. The Chinese schools "secretly" teach English, so why should they object to science and mathematics in English? As usual, he is not scrupulous with the facts. The Chinese schools openly teach English and Malay along with Chinese, believing that that puts the pupil ahead in the world after they leave. With fluent English, Malay and Chinese, they are.

The national schools soon became Malay educational ghettos. Non-Malay pupils, when they had no choice but to join national schools, were sidelined in deliberate racism. The emphasis in these schools is to ensure not a Malaysian but a Malay educational system in which the non-Malay is marginalised. So, while Malay students are graded to classes according to merit, the non-Malays are consigned, as a rule, to the weaker classes. So group them not for their educational attainments but as a racial group or as non-Malays. The government denied it, when it became a problem in Pandamaram, Port Klang, early this year, with a berriboned commission of inquiry into worthies quickly denying the obvious. The Prime Minister now says universities are now hotbed of racial tension and division, and that should stop. How could it when racism is encouraged throughout the education system?

If national-type schools already teach English without upsetting the curriculum, why has this become so political? The government does not like to be second-guessed, insists it knows what it good for the people. The government cannot force the national schools to teach science and mathematics in English if a superior form of English is already taught in the national type schools, which prepare pupils and students for public examinations in that language. The standard of education is high, far better than the standard in national schools. Non-Chinese, mostly Malay, parents, if given a choice, opt to send their children to national-type or independent Chinese schools. One statistic I saw has 15 per cent non-Chinese, the majority of whom are Malays, in the Chinese schools. This, I suspect, threatens to be a political issue amongst UMNO politicians.

This is a political issue simply because the government and UMNO insist it has the last word. The national schools pay lip service to English. The national-type Chinese schools do not. It goes without saying the product of a national school, apart from the score of so in the top rank, is far inferior to the Chinese national-type school. The Tamil national-type schools are all but ignored, by the community, by the MIC, and by the government; those who survive often succeed, but not those who do not. But even here, resistance to English is firm. When MCA and Gerakan broke ranks, it reflected larger communal concerns. With a general election due in the next year, it cannot strike a blow for Chinese education. That they do reiterates a policy decided on a whim. The Gerakan president, Dato' Seri Lim Kheng Yaik, now wants NGOs to stay out of a policy to which he agreed at first but now cannot come to accept it.

When a policy is decided and implemented on the run, it opens up communal tensions, anger, a deliberate move away from the multiracial society Malaysia is. The Malays decide on Malaysia's future with no thought to the non-Malays who reside in it. The non-Malays retreat into a self-contained communal society from which it moves out only when they have to. The government once had a policy of mixing up the races in housing projects. But that fell by the wayside when Shah Alam and Putra Jaya were built. Both are Malay cities to which the non-Malay ventures on sufferance, much like the black in the Orange Free State in apartheid South Africa. The Roman Catholics in Shah Alam cannot build a church on land alloted to them in the Shah Alam Master Plan for that purpose. Nor Hindus a temple. The state government has since decided that promises are meant to be broken to make Shah Alam a quintessential Malay, and by constitutional inference, Muslim city. As Dr Mahathir wants a federal capital that is quintessentially Malay in character and form.

When all is said and done, it is this gradual whittling away of non-Malay space that is reflected in the opposition to any government policy forced down their throats. So hamfistedly is it done so even the Malay today will not accept this Malay political diktat. This mindset would not disappear even if this squabble over English is. The BN supreme council, in which UMNO is but a member, has not discussed it. The non-Malay parties in the BN government are not consulted on important matters; if they are, the non-Malay leaders do not consult their parties; if the parties object, they are anti-national. When this is how consultation exists in the BN, how could it be otherwise in the larger Malaysian context? So the non-Malay communities withdraw into themselves, turn to culture and history for sustenance, and erect barricades against the political parties in the BN which nominally represents them. This is so of the Malay, the Chinese, the Indian. Any proposal forced down their throats is resisted, especially over education. There was the vision schools fiasco before this. This cannot be resolved with threats and forcefeeding and the ISA.

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