COMMENT Thanks to the sultan of Johor, the latest results of the student maths and science tests run by the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 76 countries will provide more grist for the mills in this country presently churning in favour of the return of English as the medium of instruction in our education system.

The results of the OECD tests show that Singapore students are No 1 in the world in maths and science proficiency, followed by those in Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

By comparison, Britain is in 20th place and the US is at 29.

Vietnam, in 12th place, is the sixth Asian nation in the top 20, allowing the news headlines to proclaim that indeed Asian youth has topped the world in maths and science.

It seems it’s no longer true, as the English poet Matthew Arnold metaphorically observed in his poem 'The Pagan World', that

‘The East bowed low before the blast in patient, deep disdain; She let the legions thunder past, and plunged in thought again.’

The East (Asia/Orient) is no longer plunged in meditative resignation before the blast of scientific progress that since the Enlightenment has emanated from the West (Occident); its youth, in some of its nations at least, is set to make all the running in terms of economic progress, enabled by rising numeracy and scientific facility.   

Actually, the OECD results do not show a correlation between English literacy and facility at maths and science.

But it is indisputable that having English as the medium of instruction in their education system has enabled Singapore to rise from colonial backwater to global cynosure in just a half-century.

And now its youth are No 1 the world over in maths and science test scores.

By contrast, Malaysia has been slithering down the slope to being economically and socially dysfunctional, in large part because of the decision from the early 1970s to replace English with Bahasa Malaysia as the medium of instruction in schools.

In his royal address last week at the opening session of the Johor state assembly, Sultan Ibrahim Ismail ( photo ) flagged the rise of Singapore as an economic power and linked that datum and what he said was the island republic’s social cohesion to English as the medium of instruction in its education system.

He proposed that Johor, in emulation of the Singapore model, revert to English as the medium of instruction.

The sultan’s timing was prescient because the just-released OECD global survey of maths and science proficiency among students places Singapore on top of the world.

The results are fodder for the return-of-English claque in Malaysia, grist that will boost their arguments for the status quo prior to the introduction of Bahasa Malaysia as the medium of instruction in the early 1970s.

These arguments have scant chance of carrying the day because Malay language nationalists would be flatly opposed to it.

Neither panacea nor elixir

But even these language romantics cannot long remain immune to what the example south of the Causeway is telling them in graphic terms: that in the end you can count on reality to wheel us into surgery for what may be called an ‘illusion-ectomy’ - that Bahasa, rather than English, as the medium of instruction has neither been social panacea nor economic elixir.

Like cancerous breasts that require mastectomy, reality over the course of time can be relied on to strip romantics of every stripe of their illusions.

The notion that with Bahasa installed as the medium of instruction in our schools national unity would be forged among Malaysia’s diverse and polyglot people has been exposed for an illusion, nearly five decades after the attempt commenced.

This may be debatable but there was more social cohesion among the populace prior to Bahasa’s introduction as the educational medium.

In the same address proposing the return of English as the instructional medium, Sultan Ibrahim Ismail warned against but did not link the spread of extremist ideologies to the paucity in English proficiency.

English has become the global medium of economic progress and social advancement.

The language of Shakespeare has been a natural alkali for the dissolution of fanaticisms of every kind.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.