English schools not the answer

I READ with surprise the reports on the demand to introduce Englishmedium schools in Malaysia. Having spent 11 years being educated in national schools before heading to the United States to pursue my education in English, I strongly disagree with the reintroduction of Englishmedium schools in Malaysia. Our national schools provide sufficient language skills to graduate from the best institutions in America, so why the sudden jolt?

It is already impossible to speak to Malaysians in the Malay language in the United States of America or even in Malaysia. Even in our consulate, you have to converse in English! And, even when I call government personnel in our embassy here or in Kuala Lumpur, I receive replies in English despite speaking in Malay and writing emails in Malay. I have to speak in English to corporate leaders and human resources staff in Kuala Lumpur as if English is the de facto official language of Malaysia. I shudder to think why the grand and noble experiment initiated by our founding fathers to uphold the lingua franca of the Malay archipelago as our national language has attained limited success.

Many years ago, my Turkish friends were surprised to learn that Malaysians of various races in the United States spoke to each other in English, like we have no language of our own. I replied that the “educated class” in Malaysia has long viewed English as the language of the educated and civilised and are too ashamed to be caught red-handed speaking in Malay.

Lest we forget, the English language came to our shores through our colonial masters who wanted to “civilise” and “enlighten” us so that we would be able to work under them, not with them. We learned English as we gawked at European civilisation. Today, this language of our colonial master has evolved as a utilitarian language – a language learnt for the sake of getting a job. If only our young Malaysians could speak English like the English, we would have a better future, they argued. But the British economy is crumbling despite their ability to speak English. A third to a half of American college graduates are underemployed and many cannot even write in English despite their ability to speak English. So, where does this myth, that by speaking English we will be able to have a bright future, come from?

Few nationalities have studied in English-medium schools, unlike the Indians and Filipinos who did so because of their British and American colonial masters. These nationalities get jobs as techies, nurses and even doctors in America. But they are only needed because there is a shortage of qualified Americans and British. Now that Trump and May are tightening their borders, the skills of these Indians and Filipinos would no longer be marketable in the English-speaking world except in the Arab world, and Singapore and Malaysia where there is still an obsession for the English language.

Secondly, even as we try hard to perfect our English, our accent is not the British or American accent. Our near-perfect scores in graduate level exams would not prevent us from being told to enunciate, talk slowly and repeat our words when we communicate with “native English speakers”.

So, by virtue of our accent, we are already not marketable to the rest of the world. Nobody would be hiring Singaporeans, Filipinos or Indians to even handle marketing calls until they are taught to speak like Americans and have “American names”.

Many of the older generation who went through English-medium schools cannot even utter one Malay sentence without contaminating it with English nouns and verbs. These are the same folk who are now clamouring for the introduction of English-medium schools.

Our obsession with English has more to do with our national psyche. English-medium schools will not make us more marketable or allow us to have a bright future; they would turn us into what our colonial master long envisioned us to be. Worse, we will now start to speak more broken Malay. RESIST Maryland, United States