Oh My English! Here we go again…

I refer to this particular article, citing our newly minted Education Minister Datuk Mahdzir Khalid on the decision to postpone the compulsory pass for SPM English.

He was reportedly to have said that students in rural areas have yet to master the language or even reach a satisfactory level in proficiency, and admitted that the country still lacked a sufficient number of English language teachers.

"We have to postpone because it is unfair for students in the rural and interior areas.”

Personally, I think that this postponement would not benefit the students and the country overall.

Not implementing the compulsory pass in English would only further the urban-rural gap, reduce the ability of upward economic mobility, and further postpone the success of policies surrounding education and graduate employability.

However, having a compulsory pass alone will not solve the problem of poor English proficiency among us.

Every one of us would know of that one friend who originated from a rural area or came from primarily religious or vernacular schools, learnt English on his or her own and is now a successful corporate lawyer or education entrepreneur.

The friend I know used to pester me to speak to her only in English and used to read dictionaries to memorise words and their meaning! She is now a teacher in a rural primary school, and I can only smile every time I see on social media how proud she is when her pupils pass with good grades for UPSR, especially with an “A” for English.

I grew up in a small town in Penang, and while my childhood friends mainly spoke Bahasa Malaysia and Tamil, my late grandfather and my parents had the foresight to speak English to me ever since I can remember.

I grew up reading Enid Blyton, Sweet Valley High, and Harry Potter.

I have been discriminated for my proficiency in the language when I was young, as while I can never claim to be a native nor fluent speaker and writer – I had a better command of the language than most of my friends in that small town.

Surprisingly, the worst of this discrimination was felt when I moved to the big city of Kuala Lumpur for my tertiary education.

To the urban, British- or American-accented English speaking crowd, I was an oddity and not cool enough, while to the Bahasa Malaysia-speakers, I was not Malay enough and was trying to show-off.

This type of environment is a compounding issue to improving English proficiency among Malaysians.

Culturally, we are too shy to admit our faults and yet too egoistic to accept help to improve. Worse, we are full of prejudice and tend to be condescending to those who are less proficient.

Hence, I think the way we are approaching this issue needs a complete revamp.

Language is the knowledge that we must apply, for if we do not practise it, we will lose it. I have experienced this with la langue Française – while I have a DELF A2 certificate, I can barely string a sentence together in French today. This is because I do not live in an environment where I speak it daily.

Mahdzir has a valid argument where in a rural setting, where most people would not be conversing in English, it is challenging to push the proficiency level up.

After all, we are talking about a compulsory pass using a Cambridge-certified examination. But to continue to postpone this policy will keep the rural students at a disadvantage.

This week, new students will enter university from all walks of life. Due to cost, most rural students will be attending public universities. Lecture notes, reference books, and lectures are mainly in English as we need to push our universities’ ranking up and bring the standards of our universities on a par with Ivy League institutions – another one of the Education Ministry’s key performance indicators.

Now tell me what will happen if we produce graduates who can barely string a sentence together in English?

The language of knowledge, business, science and trade today is English. This is no longer about patriotism or how we will lose our culture if the whole country speaks in English.

I urge the ministry to rethink this decision and instead push for training of quality English teachers, incentives for teachers to teach in rural schools and implement this policy.

Postponing it or playing ping-pong with any education policy would only continue our cycle of incompetence and lack of progress.

As Malaysians, we can do our part by conversing in English daily and lessen our prejudice towards both those who do and don’t speak in English.

I am not embarrassed to admit that I do make grammatical mistakes and cannot pronounce some words perfectly, and most people would still look at me condescendingly when I choose to pronounce /səˈvai.kəl/ instead of /sə(r)ˈvaɪk(ə)l/, but life goes on, and we can only keep improving ourselves.

The biggest mistake is in not starting. – September 2, 2015.