Weed out the root of failures

It is still not too late for the Government to check the decline in both English and Bahasa Malaysia, and strengthen the education system.

By Veera Pandiyan (The Star)

FIFTY years from now, global communication will be conducted mostly in three languages – Chinese, Spanish and English.

Hindi, Bengali, Urdu and Punjabi will also be big because of India’s growing population, while Arabic, too, is set to be significant for both religious and economic reasons.

That’s the opinion of Henry Hitchings, author of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World, and The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English.

He reckons that many languages would have disappeared by then, irrecoverably, taking their cultures along with them.

Hitchings, whose views were among those highlighted in the Freakonomics blog of the New York Times last year, makes some pertinent observations.

While there are 6,500 languages, only 11 – Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, French, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, German, Japanese and Arabic – account for the speech of more than half the world’s population.

He says, whether we like it or not, what happens in the world’s major languages tend to be seen as more significant or more worthy than those in the lesser languages.

For example, a book published in English will have a far wider reach than one published in Czech, regardless of quality or merit.

This is the reason scholars seek to enhance their credentials and visibility of their work in English. It also explains why universities, which used to be national institutions, have become an international marketplace.

Globalisation has also made English especially important in IT, business, diplomacy and rapidly changing technology.

Up to two billion people will soon be learning the language. Hitchings says the yearning to learn English reflects a desire to be plugged into a kind of “world brain”.

This particular observation might strike a chord with those who are alarmed at the declining standards of the language in Malaysia:

“To many people, the spread of English seems a positive thing, symbolising employment, education, modernity.

“But to many others, it seems ominous. They hold it responsible for grinding down or homogenising their identities and interests.”

Last week, Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin said he was surprised to find out that a pass in English was no longer compulsory for the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM).

He was ostensibly more shocked to discover that national schools were no longer teaching grammar.

The Education Ministry is currently gauging public feedback on whether it should make English compulsory again for SPM. The response so far has been overwhelmingly no rather than yes.

It looks like it’s not just the teaching of English that the ministry is grappling with. The standard of Bahasa Malaysia (BM), too, has also been steadily sliding over the decades.

Unlike before 2000, when a credit in BM was a must to qualify for SPM, a pass in the national language is all that is needed to qualify for a certificate.

As in the case of English, it is obvious that the passing mark for BM, too, has been dragged down gradually. Rumour has it that it can even be brought down to 30.

But like limbo rock, just how low can you go?

It’s disgraceful, but despite the quality of English and BM having sunk to abysmal levels, the stance is still one of denial and reluctance to face facts.

Instead of admitting flawed policies and looking for long-term solutions, the priority seems to be on putting on more blinkers.

Officials are now worried that as many as 130,000 students – a third of the 440,000 candidates who sit for SPM yearly – will fail if English is made a compulsory subject.

What about the consequences of failing to check the rot? Wouldn’t the next generation of Malaysians be left gasping in the wake of others moving ahead in an increasingly competitive world?

Let’s face it. The selfish and misguided agenda of the so-called champions of the national language who had been pushing for English to be placed on the back burner has wrought enough damage to the country.

Ironically, their misplaced zeal has not raised the standard of BM to become a good enough medium for learning science and technology, never mind the much-needed translation of books.

Yet, some of these dinosaurs are still mouthing ridiculous views like describing rural students who fail English as “victims of English language colonisation”.

Especially at a time when the Government has little choice but to weed out the root causes of failures in our education system.

Yes, the Government must upgrade the quality of teaching and learning of both English and BM, and speedily boost the professional skills of teachers. But more so, it must come to terms that grave mistakes have been made in the past – mostly for political expediency.

But we can still gain if we choose to change, even at this late hour.

As Hitchings says, one of the intriguing consequences of globalisation is the changing of English’s centre of gravity.

Its future is going to be defined not in America or Britain, but by the new economies, in places like Bangalore, Chongqing or Bratislava. Or even Kuala Lumpur, if we choose to act quickly.

English is becoming the language of the urban middle class, and with the ability to use it becoming a basic skill, prestige attached to speaking it with native fluency will shrink.

As technology breaks down borders, it will no longer be sensible to think of a precise association between particular languages and particular territories.

As he rightly observes, nobody owns languages any more.

> Associate Editor M. Veera Pandiyan wishes to share this quote from Khalil Gibran: Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfish to seek other than itself.