PPSMI

I've been hearing a lot on why we should or should not abolished PPSMI.

For me, we should abolish it due to :

1. Practical reason - that the Malay kids generally don't know English (and don't speak) English at home. Asking them to interpret Physics and Maths in English is a hindrance to their conceptual understanding at a very early age. This will demoralized students and therefore unnecessarily killed students interests in learning. We need kids to have fun with science and math, not burdening them with scientific English words at early age.

2. Nationalistic reason - that the Malay language is now rapidly diverging from the path of intellectual domains, that the reason we use it is that, to tell stories to kampung folks, to bluff them, to ridicule them, and to poke fun at them.

I really don't get why TAR College can survive as the champion of Chinese language while the Malays are lamenting that we can't get anything out of our own language.

The fact is, we can learn and excel at both language, but not more than two.

The only reason that we should not introduce anymore languages is because they're too many.
We should just use Malay and English, that's it. Much like Canadian use French and English, but we don't have to declare our country to be bi-lingual.

I'm not saying that we should not learn English, in fact, we should also master it. But we make it secondary. Because we have our own language. I thought Dr. M is the one who thought me to "Look East". I'm now looking at Japan.

We pride ourselves to be having a national language, only to have all sorts of ideas to remove it from intellectual domains. It's true that it's hard to translate English to Malay on all scientific terms. The thing is, we don't have to - we should adapt it whenever possible, and use our language in our academic institutions for intellectual discussions as well as everyday conversations.

Another way is to have collaboration with our Indonesian counterpart - the Malay language was used both by Malaysia and Indonesia for this very practical reason that we can use it together. Malaysian alone do not have critical mass to be using Malay language to warrant books translations, etc.

That way, we grow as a nation, with soul.

Kerana , Bahasa Jiwa Bangsa.