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The online plea from tens of thousands of people shows that the Teaching and Learning of Science and Mathematics in English (PPSMI) policy needs to be re-looked, said Parent Action Group for Education Malaysia (PAGE).
Its chairman Datin Noor Azimah Abdul Rahim said there was a huge support for the policy to continue on the Facebook group “1M Malaysians say YES to PPSMI as an OPTION”, as well as related blogs and websites.
The Facebook group has registered over 94,000 people as at 8.30pm yesterday.
Noor Azimah said she acknowledged the concern expressed by Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin over the lack of proficient English teachers.
“However, teachers should be able to teach in both languages as they have been teaching the subjects in English since the introduction of PPSMI in 2003,” she said.
Noor Azimah said that if the number of schools that chose English was small, then it would be easier to provide the teachers.
She added that the reasons should be addressed head-on and not swept under the carpet.
PAGE has also started a “Yes to PPSMI option” on its website.
PAGE will be handing an appeal letter on the matter to the Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak at his office in Putrajaya today, and the movement urged parents to turn up for support.
Jaringan Melayu Malaysia (JMM) president Azwanddin Hamzah said Muhyiddin should have called for a discussion with JMM and PAGE before making a final decision.
“We (JMM and PAGE) are not doing this for personal interest, but for all parents in Malaysia,” he said.
National Union of the Teaching Profession (NUTP) secretary-general Lok Yim Pheng said that while she did not deny the importance of English, there would be many constraints in having a dual system in schools.
“Implementing both the Uphol-ding Bahasa Melayu and Strengthening the English Language (MBM-MBI) policy; as well as PPSMI, in schools would involve massive cost and a lot of changes to the school structure.
“I support the fact that we have to enhance English proficiency among our students, but in this case, we have to look at the statistics and feedback from the ground which shows that not all children can cope with learning Science and Maths in English,” she said.
3 comments:
The PAGE data looks good and encouraging. It demolishes the MOE stand to revocate PPSMI.
After nine years of PPSMI, a multi-million ringgit foundation has been laid to continue it. There are many schools with teachers who can competently teach Science and Maths in english and there are many parents who support PPSMI vigorously. The results also show the students have achieved academic success riding on an ascending wave.
Instead of a stultifying and stupifying chickin'-shit blanket cancellation of the program, the MOE must support these schools to continue the PPSMI, and support their growth without fear or chauvinism into the future.
One cannot accept the reason that things will be chaotic and the MOE will have administrative difficulties.
If it were so, PPSMI and the teachers and students of those schools would not have lasted this far on their own, what more achieve those encouraging and promising results as unarguably reflected in the PAGE data.
And if it were so, the government would not have raised salaries, salary scales and bonuses of the teaching and administrative professions in recognition of progress made (;P).
Now, what's going to happen when you have a two-mode delivery? The present government will be held to its word that it no longer knows best. On educational matters, the market, in this case parents and their children, will tell the government what they need to get ahead in this world.
There will no doubt be some who will still want the subjects to be taught in bahasa. But there will be many, and one suspects, an unstoppably increasing number with each year, who will want the subjects to be taught in english.
As the former start finding out that the latter will be doing much better, they will want the same too. That will take time and if the MOE is supportive, it will take just enough time for the teachers weak in bahasa to catch up in english to change the two-mode delivery system into the one-mode international lingua franca delivery system of the world.
Isn't that what the Singapore education system has become? So, if the MOE returns from his visit to Singapore and immediately says he will adopt the Singapore vocational system for technical studies, a subset of an education spectrum, how can he abolish PPSMI in one stroke when it is the genesis of the internationalization of our education system whose traits, quality and delivery systems are what have propelled rich-cat Umnoputras to quietly send their own children to international schools in disdain of the very system they have personally shaped?
Are they suggesting they don't really believe in what they are doing? Are they recommending that what is best for their own need not be best for those whom they presume to lead? Are they honestly thinking of the well-being and future of the human resource of this country as it seeks to surmount the pyramid of innovation, science, technology, and abracadabra so that Malaysia truly Asia will be a high-income, advanced but caring, nobel-prize producing super-duper power in its own right in this abad dua puluh satu?
2/2
Now that the aforementioned question mark has arrived at your non-limbic prefrontal cortex, you will draw your own conclusion about the entire matter.
It is all about fear.
It is not just the growth of PPSMI that is feared. It is also the fear that the success of PPSMI will create the demand for english as medium of instruction for the other subjects as well. It is fear of the erosion of the use of our bahasa. This fear blocks out all rational solutions by advancing the simplistic argument that since there are some teachers who can't teach in english, all teachers should be made to teach in bahasa, even if it kills the future of the young in a world awash in knowledge by which nations seek out their competitive advantages to surmount global challenges and economic constraints.
Just answer honestly - what competitive advantages do we have today as the result of the malaynification of our society and educational system?
The MOE must have privately known the same answer you are now trying to frame on your bitter lips. Otherwise how do you explain why the minister's counterpart in the higher education ministry has at this coincidental time insisted that foreign students in local institutions must now learn bahasa while his ministry is on the quiet changing the Mara national junior colleges into english-medium institutions? Why the double-standards even in national education?
Which is ALSO why those in the vernacular schools while learning things in their mother tongues as passports to a new century riding on the emergence of China and India must also never underestimate the importance of maintaining full command of the english language for cutting edge knowledge. Our rakyat have had a headstart and it can still be salvaged despite the machinations of the likes of Muhyiddin and his ilk.
It is all that stands between us and the darkness championed by jokers like him and his group of ibrahim ali's, ridhuan tee's and rahim noor's.
Be pragmatic for the sake of the young. Let it be their elders' last legacy for them.
Get them back to stand as equals to others in this global village. Not the kampung's of the chauvinists who are so frightened of their own extinction that they will throw flimsy excuses and grasp all irrational, deluded and denialistic straws to safeguard their own interests, even above the future of this nation.
As for those in the dot who had received his invitation to invest in places like Desaru, they should ask the first batch of investors in that project the full price of the investment incurred. Placido Domingo was the MB there at that time. Morals 101, anyone?
Let all parents in this country wake up once and for all.
Make that happen before the next general elections.
One million of you are already overseas. That's just the officially tracked figure. It is more and you know it. And you know why.
If we want this country to be the place for the young, we must make it relevant for them.
As things stand now, the whole system is completely kucar-kacir. Fucked up, many will cough out.
And he wants you to just 'accept the decision' but so that the next generation of our malaysians will continue to buy veeeli-cheeep binoculars without blinking an eye. Why, it's not our money after all, no?
Is this post good enough for tomorrow's cabinet meeting? Then move on it, bro.
i am pissed, people.
"Education is not the filling of a vessel, but the kindling of a flame." – Socrates
Education makes people easy to lead but "difficult to drive", easy to govern but "impossible to enslave"
Ketuanan UMNOputras only know how to "Enslave the Bumiputras" through the use of Bahasa Malaysia...
“Bonsification” of the Ketuanan “Brains”
But only manage to "slow down" the non-Bumis towards "Excellence & Advancements."
Just to share this...
China Pushes English Language - ABC News - http://abcnews.go.com/WN/China/china-pushes-english-language/story?id=12154435
Guess who will be the “Losers”?
You be the judge.
Shalom.
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