What an ‘A’ in M’sian English means
Azly Rahman
I read with interest a recent newsreport in The Malaysian Insider stating ‘Job seekers with A in SPM English but can’t speak a word of it’.
I can sense we are all worried. As a promoter of the transformation of all Malaysian secondary schools into English-medium schools, here are my thoughts on the report:
We politicise language too much, linking English with colonialism when this language itself too helped dismantle colonialism, through the work of people such as the Great Soul (Mahatma) Gandhi, Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta, Tunku Abdul Rahman, the Malaysian freedom fighters such as the Malay Radicals, the Nationalists, and other heroes such as Chin Peng (pic above), Rashid Maidin, Shamsiah Fakeh… just name it – they read English works on liberalism and freedom and use them against their masters, to dismantle the Master-Slave Narrative.
A lot of damage has been done, quite irreversible unless policymakers change their mindset, the idiotic pride of the ultra Bahasa Melayu language activists reduced to ashes, educational leaders not understanding global education be removed or make way for those who care about the importance of this lingua franca, Maths and Science taught in the English Language, and a range and host of other strategies taken to reverse this worrying trend.
Essentially one must understand the idea of language as reality, as constructor of reality, and even as deconstructor of reality and how worldviews are shaped by it.
In fact I would also venture to propose that each one of us is a “being constructed cognitively solely by language” which might explain why some people become world-wise individuals through the mastery of many languages and have empathy of multiple worldviews or multiple voices/multivocalities and how unfortunately by being so intensely immersed in one language, take the disabling aspect of the culture of the language – becomes a jihadist… perhaps because the language of jihadism and hudud-ism itself is a “habitus” and a “hegemony” of those who own the means of producing violence as in the case of the mass and mechanistic production of suicide bombers who think that “suicide is sweet” and that, through some strange hadis (sayings of the Prophet) 7 million virgins await in the backdoor of paradise.
