Dear Hishammuddin,

I heard recently that you give a harsh critics to Koh Tsu Koon on the issue of teaching maths in English, and menace disobedient schools, mostly "jenis kebangsaan", of cutting subsidy. Well, I don't think your attitude conforms to the spirit of Barisan "nesyenel", either. Everybody knows that the desicion is almost made so that your stand is official. Koh is just hoping to make a desperate move so that teaching in mother tongue will not disappear totally. Or perhaps you are smart enough to notice that but it is still more profitable to make demagogic declaration for personal promotion in politics? As for the subsidy, in case you did not notice yet, I would like to tell you that 96% of subsidy is given to "sekolah kebangsaan", which adopt already the official politics. Hence, the menace is not appalling enough to change others' mind but I'm convinced that you would soon find an adequate punishment.

The arguments of opponents are various but reasonable and easy to understand. To know our differences, we should firstly ask which initial intention of this politics is -- to improve maths or to improve English? If our aim is to improve English by learning maths in English, than I think is quite clear that it is a rather absurd idea. We never think that English people are good in English since they learn math in English, do we? Some literati just understand nothing in maths, but win Noble prize in literature. Singapore is a country which gives us another counter example. While doing nearly all disciplines in English, they are globally recognized for excelling in Singlish.

However, if we claim that the project aims at improving maths by learning it in English, it will also turn out to be ridiculous. France has the highest density of Fields Medal laureates (in proportion to its population). Do they learn maths in English? Germans are famous for their scientific knowledge and their exportation of industrial goods per inhabitant is the highest of the world. Do they learn science in English? As for the Japanese, their engineers should have the worst English level but everyone appreciate their products.

In fact, English is widely used for some recent historical reasons, probably English people are the most cunning colonials. However, to think that we should imitate English spoken country to keep abreast of them is erroneous. We shall have the ambition to improve both disciplines, namely maths and English so that we have better chance to learn new things, but the actual method will only spoil our plan. It creates people who can neither speak correct English, nor understand maths. The real manner to improve maths level is to change students' attitude towards it, not changing the teaching language.

I specially choose English to write this letter with the hope that you will read carefully and entirely the message, since English seems to be your favorite language. Indeed, if you are still in the mist for what I am saying, then I don't think anybody else can help you to get rid of the myth of improving maths by using English.

berkhidmat untuk pendidikan

nova