He sighed, “Of course, I expected them to ask the questions, and I understood the concepts. But I suddenly realised that I couldn’t express myself properly,”
“Why not?”
“Because I learnt all the mathematical and physics concepts in Bahasa!”
This story always comes to my mind when I read news relating to the medium of instruction for maths and science. In the early 2000s, when they switched the medium of instruction to English, most parents I knew breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, their children might actually be ‘globally competitive’ in the job market.
Yet PKR Youth recently passed a resolution describing the teaching of science and maths in English as “a betrayal of the position of Bahasa Melayu as the national language”. This headline left me perplexed. How does the teaching of certain subjects in English amount to a ‘betrayal’?
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