So when I read today that “many object to making English a must pass subject for SPM”, I thought, “Oh great, here we go again”.

Someone needs to buy a “Survey Basics for Dummies” book.

They say that most out of the measly 500 views they got object to it. But how many are “most”? And what in the world is 500 compared to the entire Malaysian population? Someone needs to teach them how to properly conduct a survey and report survey results. Either that, or the powers that be are bullshitting us and riling us up for another round of debates. After all, they’ve run out of things for us to debate in the media – Perak, teaching Science and Math in English, Altantunya…. etc

But, education is a sore spot for politics. As much as it sucks, the truth is that students are neglected most of the time by the politicians unless it involves officiating things with the media involved. Politicians typically try to appeal to voters – none of which are primary or secondary level students. Our Education Minister said that “he was also shocked to learn that national schools no longer taught English grammar”.

I take away two things from this. Firstly, our government is obviously not placing enough emphasis and importance on the monitoring of our school syllabi. Secondly, he either does not have any children, or if he does, they are probably educated overseas or in private institutions. All of our politicians should take a step back and take off their political-mind-game caps and just momentarily replace them with parent caps.

Learning English is not easy.

And I’m saying this from the perspective of someone who grew up in a primarily English-speaking environment and mingled among people who speak English as their first language. I can honestly tell you that aside from Mrs. Leong in Std 6, I learned nothing about the language during my 10 years of public schooling. I attribute my fluency wholly to my mother and Mrs. Brohier, my English tutor of many, many years. From them, I learned proper pronunciation, grammar, sentence structures, essay-writing and analytic writing, among others. That makes me one of the lucky few of my generation who can afford having a tutor in the first place and who are blessed enough to be born into a family who uses English daily. How many students are blessed enough for all that?

Many of my friends speak good English and write decently, in fact. But not many of them are aware of what nouns, pronouns, adverbs, synonyms, antonyms or even homonyms are! I can’t really blame them since I have never heard them my entire 10 years in school! Without my mother and Mrs. Brohier, I would never have known about the intricacies of the English language either. What I learned in school consisted mainly of reading passages, how to answer comprehension questions, how to write essays of different formats, etc. etc. But nothing of the sheer basics of the language. So our government can spend the next few months (or years, who knows?) debating on whether or not to make passing English compulsory and do nothing meanwhile. Or, they can do something about the way English is taught while debating (if they really need to).

At the end of the day…

They can play mind games all they want and use education as a gambling point to gain more votes.

They can even rely on and applaud “Malay supremacist” views that say that giving English so much importance in Malaysian education makes us “victims of the English Language colonisation” or that our “national unity” will be affected.

But let’s be realistic here. Backward and narrow thinking does not take us anywhere. It does not take a rocket scientist to be aware of the fact that English is the dominant International language in just about any field there is, and its reach is truly global. Unless Malaysia is as self-sufficient as Japan, in order to become truly competitive, our people need a working knowledge of the English language. An almost 70% pass of English at SPM level is an appalling statistic – someone needs to teach the powers that be to be aware of the actual meaning behind that of that thrown-around statistic.

You often notice that our politicians make a large number of observations about many different topics on education that are basically the same thing – that the nation’s teaching staff is under-qualified. One of the reasons why education is a stagnant sector is because our government spends a disproportionate amount of time on politicking and making obvious and completely unhelpful “observations”.

But at the end of the day, what are they doing about it? How many more generations of students will continue to lose out on opportunities simply because our schools are not prepped enough to promote excellence?