I had a discussion with a group of retired teachers recently, on the standard of English in secondary schools. To start the discussion, I quoted a writer to the press about how a student pronounced crocodile as "crocodelee". To my amazement, one of them said that when asked to read a story, a student read "onche yewpon a timee" and another pronounced cucumber as "chuchumber"! I thought what my daughter told me was bad enough for a teacher to pronounce lettuce as "letiuse".

One ex-teacher even mentioned about a teacher who had obtained a diploma in English or teaching English and later even obtained a degree. Yet he was not confident enough to converse with him in English, and neither was he teaching English in class!

These group of retirees have actually applied for posts as English teachers but due to red tape or whatever, have waited for months without any news. So what we have read in the papers about efforts to improve the standard of English will take a long, long time indeed. In the meantime, parents should better look after the welfare of their own children by doing something themselves rather than wait for the Education Ministry.

On the dramatic drop in standard of English, one said since a minister of education set a policy of just teaching conversational English as opposed to learning by traditional way of grammar, the majority of students cannot write proper sentences nor even speak properly. With standard of teachers of English low, it is like the half-blind leading the blind.

The policy of civil servants not entertaining letters in English had made it worse. The civil servants had a nice time throwing letters in English into wastebaskets without having to reply. Till today, in spite of our PM's exhortation to improve our standard of English, I have this feeling that an e-mail which I sent to the Education Ministry recently in English was not replied not because of poor maintenance of the website but of the old habit of not replying letters in English... it is so convenient, isn't it?

As usual, we do not have leaders who are strong enough to see through a policy for fear of losing popular support.