No English pls, we are Chinese

I am not sure what the hubbub is about based on recent comments made by this Chinese group who plans to go on a nationwide protest if the Government goes ahead to teach Maths and Science in English in Chinese schools. The president of Jiao Zong, the United Chinese School Teachers Association said they will go on strike since it will deteriorate the Mandarin language. I personally think it was very myopic of this association.

While they are very concerned about losing the proficiency in Mandarin, they don't seem to care about losing proficiency in the English language. If you have spoken to about 75% of our university students, you will know what I mean. I did interview some of our brightest from our best universities and many of them either did not understand what I was saying or couldn't even string a decent sentence together.

I am not talking about going for debates or reciting Shakespeare. I am talking about having a simple conversation in English. Some of them even asked if the interview could be conducted in Malay. This came from both Chinese and Malay graduates. The Malays want us to only speak Malay and the Chinese only want to learn Mandarin. No wonder we are SOOOO screwed up!! Maybe I should campaign for us speaking Hindi or Tamil as well!

It seems Malaysians are just conducting businesses with Malays and Chinese speaking people only. The biggest economies are in Eastern Europe, India, China and the US. While these countries are definitely very proud of their language and heritage, they are learning to speak many languages. An average educated European will be able to speak English, French, German and their own mother tongue. An average Indian can definitely speak English, Hindi and their own dialect. We pride ourselves of having a multi-cultural society but we don't want to assimmilate amongst overselves.

While I have a lot of respect for countries who are trying to have one language to encourage national integration, I really think that it is still very myopic of them, like Thailand and Indonesia. I think they will be a lot better off if only they encouraged speaking English. When I was in Hong Kong, China and Korea, there were lots of classifieds, advertising people who can be paid by the hour to converse English with. While we were there, my son and I were always followed by people who wanted to speak English with us. This was especially so in Korea. And here we are, trying to kill it. What arrogance and ignorance.

My kids go to a Chinese school not because I think the Chinese school system is better. In many ways it is not. Many of my generation were brought up in a "Kebangsaan" or Malay school and we turned out fine. I sent my kids to a Chinese school for them to learn and be proficient in Mandarin and forgive me for being ignorant but I think teaching 2 subjects in English is hardly going to diminish the proficiency of Mandarin!

The again, what the heck do I know!

So, I just want to say to this group, that they can go ahead and protest. I want balance for the future generation and I want them to learn as many languages as possible. Not because I am a Chindian but you can poll other Chinese and see the results for themselves. No one appointed these guys as our spoke people so they can go jump in a very deep lake and have bacteria and fungus crawl up their colon and lay a colony of puss inducing lavae. (Maybe I overdid that statement).

For this, I do salute the Education Ministry for taking the right steps and not reacting rashly. So for the sake of our young ones, let us learn more than 1 language. Maybe I should have written this in Chinese since I bet they don't know what the heck I just wrote, Probably wondering what puss is!!