Education is the transmission of civilization - Will Durant
It is not rocket science to understand the need to teach maths and science in English. It is pure good sense to do so. We are not talking about geography, religion, history here...just maths and science. Try entering a good bookstore and try to buy a decent science or maths book in Bahasa. You’d be hard pressed to get 2 books that have writings and explanation interesting enough to entice your child to read them.
Singapore our neighbour studies both subjects in English in school with no consternation about losing their ‘Chinese’ identity. Here, we create ghostly hallucinations about losing touch of our so-called ‘Bahasa Ibunda’.
Malay was the lingua franca ages ago when Tanah Melayu was the epi-centre of trade this part of the region. Chinese, Indian and even Arab traders are converted to speak Malay. When Europe was in the Dark Ages, western scholars have to learn Arabic to master scientific knowledge. These texts are then painstakingly converted into Latin or other languages to help students there understand.
My question is...How many scientific texts/books have been successfully translated into malay?
I studied in Bahasa during form 5. When I entered university, 100% of my books are in English. Sure, that was in 1986. My sis-in law is doing medicine now and still 100% of the books are in English. So what gives, Tan Sri Muhyiddin, our esteemed TPM?
Try goggling ‘sains’, and you will get 9.3 million hits, goggling ‘science’ would have a mind boggling 674 million hits.
According to NST in 2006, 21% of the students failed SPM. 90% of these students failed because they failed Bahasa Malaysia paper. It makes sense to improve the QUALITY of the teaching of normal Bahasa Malaysia instead of barking at the wrong tree.
It also makes sense to make it MANDATORY to have a higher credit passing marks for Bahasa Malaysia to receive a full SPM certificate instead of the current practise of just passing BM to guarantee a SPM cert.
Politics interfering with our National Education policy is bad. Add in stupid politicians and equally stupid opposition parties, maybe we would be better off letting 15 year olds become our Education minister. I bet it will not be worse off than what is happening now.
It is not rocket science to understand the need to teach maths and science in English. It is pure good sense to do so. We are not talking about geography, religion, history here...just maths and science. Try entering a good bookstore and try to buy a decent science or maths book in Bahasa. You’d be hard pressed to get 2 books that have writings and explanation interesting enough to entice your child to read them.
Singapore our neighbour studies both subjects in English in school with no consternation about losing their ‘Chinese’ identity. Here, we create ghostly hallucinations about losing touch of our so-called ‘Bahasa Ibunda’.
Malay was the lingua franca ages ago when Tanah Melayu was the epi-centre of trade this part of the region. Chinese, Indian and even Arab traders are converted to speak Malay. When Europe was in the Dark Ages, western scholars have to learn Arabic to master scientific knowledge. These texts are then painstakingly converted into Latin or other languages to help students there understand.
My question is...How many scientific texts/books have been successfully translated into malay?
I studied in Bahasa during form 5. When I entered university, 100% of my books are in English. Sure, that was in 1986. My sis-in law is doing medicine now and still 100% of the books are in English. So what gives, Tan Sri Muhyiddin, our esteemed TPM?
Try goggling ‘sains’, and you will get 9.3 million hits, goggling ‘science’ would have a mind boggling 674 million hits.
According to NST in 2006, 21% of the students failed SPM. 90% of these students failed because they failed Bahasa Malaysia paper. It makes sense to improve the QUALITY of the teaching of normal Bahasa Malaysia instead of barking at the wrong tree.
It also makes sense to make it MANDATORY to have a higher credit passing marks for Bahasa Malaysia to receive a full SPM certificate instead of the current practise of just passing BM to guarantee a SPM cert.
Politics interfering with our National Education policy is bad. Add in stupid politicians and equally stupid opposition parties, maybe we would be better off letting 15 year olds become our Education minister. I bet it will not be worse off than what is happening now.
