PPSMI to PPSMBM

Some groups may appreciate this government's decision but some groups may be dissapointed. Well, I belong to the latter. Though I've gone through the years of schooling whereby the subjects were taught in BM, but I was happy enough to hear a govt effort to transform the learning curriculum of science and maths in schools. I was delighted because when the government implemented PPSMI, I was already in college, where I had, for the first time of my learning experience, learned science and mathematics in English, formally. Indeed, it was undeniably exciting and an eye opener. Though the teachers in my school used to teach Chemistry and Add Maths in English even though the syllabus was in Malay, it provided me a level of comfort while learning these subjects in advanced stage. And since everything was taught in English in college, I explored many new things in Science which brought me to another level of knowledge, not just it was much much more easier to understand and grasp, but it provided us a platform to speak in the same level of knowledge as the geniuses of the world is speaking.

While some may say how the Germans, Japanese, French excelled in their field of R&D by using their own mother tongue, the fact is that their journals are all written in English. I did many literature reviews myself while I was doing my thesis, Haratake and Oyaizu from Japan made their journals readable by publishing it in a language which the world could understand. Zhao et al. from China also wrote a journal in English, AbouEl-Eneih et al. from the Middle East also published a journal in English. Of course there are also journals written in other languages, but this requires a translation effort. Someone might already have found the cure to cancer perhaps once you finished translating an entire journal and by the time you are about to start a research, a cure for swine flu emerges.

What is lacking here is actually the effort from the students and teachers themselves to learn the language and let them being confined in a world where making a change is impossible since they are comfortable at a place they are now. This is a fact, and I've experienced seeing it. The world may laugh at you for having a lousy and miserable start, but the success is even sweeter when one has gone through dejected moments in his life. And this of course, doesn't come in a blink of an eye.