The reversal policy to teach Science and Mathematics in English is akin to dumbing down all for the sake of those who are slow due to implementation woes.

IT’S insanity, by Albert Einstein’s definition. We are back to doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

The Government has switched back to Bahasa Malaysia for the teaching of science and maths in national schools while in Chinese and Tamil schools, it will be in their respective mother tongues.

Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin who is also Education Minister cited the widening gap in the performance between urban and rural school children for changing back the medium of instruction. Caving in to political pressure would be a more convincing explanation.

BM was the language used for more than three decades -- a period that saw a slide in the standard of English in schools and arguably, along with it, the quality of our education, especially when compared with our neighbour in the south.

Six years ago, the then Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad decided to revert the teaching of the two subjects to English, recognising the importance of the language for keeping up with fast changes in science and technology. Sure, it was an abrupt decision, now derided as “not well thought out” by so-called nationalistic educationists and opportunistic politicians.

But it was a correct and courageous one, never mind the fact that the former PM only seemed to have realised the error of relegating English to second or third language status, just before he stepped down.

In fairness, in spite of the generally poor English proficiency of teachers serving in the rural areas, the first group of students were not doing too badly.

And although the so-called champions of BM had long been unhappy with the policy, better known by its Malay acronym of PPSMI, they chose to be most vocal and even staged raucous street protests only after some results were beginning to show.

Year Six pupils who had sat for the UPSR after completing primary schooling under PPSMI showed a slight improvement in English while performance in BM remained constant. Children from both urban and rural schools also scored more A, B and C’s in science and maths.

Most of the experts, teachers and top ministry officials were fully supportive of the policy and felt it should continue, in spite of obvious weaknesses such as the poor command of English among teachers in rural areas.

The upsurge in gripe from the nationalists spiked earlier this year, coincidentally, just as former Education Minister and current Home Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Tun Hussein was in the thick of running for a vice-president’s post in Umno.

Education director-general Tan Sri Alimuddin Mohd Dom took pains to explain that assessment of the policy’s effectiveness could only be made in four more years, or after it had undergone 10 years of implementation.

But the doses of emotional tedium from the GMP (Gerakan Mansuhkan PPSMI or Movement for the Abolition of Teaching and Learning Science and Mathematics in English), and from Pakatan Rakyat’s predominantly Malay-based parties of PAS and PKR have produced the desired effect.

PKR’s Kulim Bandar Baru MP Zulkifli, (who is supposed to be in charge of Higher Education in PR’s shadow Cabinet) must surely deserve special mention, even after his asinine comment about Filipinos being proficient in English but only ending up as maids.

Their assertions revolved around two themes -- BM is a reflection of Malaysia’s identity and continuing with the policy is tantamount to contravening the Constitution on the special position of the national language and children in rural areas would lose out because they would not be able to grasp lessons in English.

As for the first, in all honesty, is this really so? While there are indeed those who cannot speak or write BM or choose not to, the majority of Malaysians accept the national language. Students, particularly, know its significance for they have to get at least a credit for it in SPM, before they can think about higher levels of education.

The inability of many of our graduates to speak in English during job interviews reflects the dismal level that our standard of the language has plunged to. Is it a wonder why thousands of local graduates remain unemployed?

The policy was an effective strategy to provide our students the best means to learn science and maths so that they would not be left in the wake of swift economic and technological change, or struggle through limited translations of technical books during their tertiary education.

The second argument in favour of rural students is more absurd. There are fewer rural students than urban students and their under-performance can easily be traced to the root causes -- poorer backgrounds, lesser quality of teachers and lack of facilities and resources in the schools. These are merely problems in implementation which could be resolved with better trained teachers and adequate funds.

Reversing the policy at the expense of students who are already coping well with English is akin to an exercise in dumbing down all to meet the level of those who are slow. Of course the proponents on both sides of the divide claim that they represent the majority.

How about a referendum? Let only those who really matter be given the right to vote, like the parents of children who are midway through the policy.

It’s tragic that we are still tangled over education policies tied to language and race, five decades after independence, especially when elsewhere in the developed world, the focus is on the need to design curricula to fit the demands of the quickly changing Information Age.

Author and creativity guru Sir Ken Robinson, one of the advisers to the Singapore government for its strategy to become the creative hub of Southeast Asia, for example, has been arguing for radical changes in how countries think about intelligence and human resources and in how they should educate people to meet the challenges of living and working today.

Dr Rod Riegle, a former of Illinois State University professor and expert on education for the Information Age, says all current education systems are based on outdated demands.

Within the next few years, 80% of workers around the world would be doing jobs very differently from the way it had been done over the past 50 years. To survive, he says, people, organisations and countries must acquire, analyse, and communicate information more quickly than their competitors.

Would Malaysians be able to do these without having a strong good command of English?

Associate Editor M. Veera Pandiyan thinks this observation from Helen Keller is apt: There is one thing worse than not being able to see; being able to see and having no vision.

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