By Joachim Ng
You may never have imagined that the placid riverside town of Bagan Datuh, 46km west of bustling Teluk Intan and with a population just slightly more than 70,000 is able to hook a grand STEM prize. It did last August when Sekolah Menengah (SM) Sains Bagan Datoh claimed the top spot in a national competition involving students from selected schools across Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, Perak, and Negri Sembilan.
The competition was aimed at promoting Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) learning among youth through engaging school workshops and intellectually stimulating quizzes.
The Government has set a salutary goal of achieving a 60:40 ratio of science to arts students as well as promoting interest in STEM among lower-secondary B40 students. It should, however, widen the horizon by setting ambitious public targets such as fixing a minimal number of scientific research papers that must be published every year, and proposing a minimal number of technological breakthroughs that must be achieved.
One of Perak’s most famous sons, Tan Sri Sir Dr Jeffrey Cheah, wrote in his 2024 National Day essay: “Clearly, we must enhance our education system to take into account the latest advances in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) as well as instilling critical thinking skills and inculcating the right ethical values.
“It is also vital that we build an ecosystem of educational excellence and research to strengthen our human capital development, in order to attract foreign investments that will lead to the creation of high-value employment opportunities. I have always believed that quality education offers the best route out of poverty and misery.”
Tan Sri Jeffrey Cheah’s meteoric rise from the small and poverty-ridden town of Pusing to the dizzying heights of business entrepreneurial success is a lesson for our national and state planners: STEM education is the route out of poverty.
This two-part series will go beyond STEM to highlight a programme of rural poverty eradication through comprehensive education that the Government should have adopted many decades ago. Had the Government done so, rural poverty in Malaysia would have long ago been transformed into rural wealth and the nation would have achieved an economic rating closer to that of Singapore.
The Government’s big mistake starting from the 1970s was to downplay the importance of science learning. Every year since then has shown a declining trend of interest in physics, biology, chemistry, and mathematics. Singapore, on the other side of the Causeway, showed leaping interest resulting in the tiny republic overtaking Malaysia in every field of scientific and technological advancement.
China has become the world’s second leading scientific nation just behind America, and it’s not because of a large population – India has more people but is not among the top five. It’s also not because China is fully urbanised like Singapore, as the majority of Chinese people still live in rural areas dependent on agricultural earnings.
Here again, the difference with Malaysia is that the Chinese exam system requires students to be competent not only in Mandarin but also in English, science, mathematics, and humanities. Malaysia’s exam system requires competence in Bahasa Malaysia only.
In Singapore and China, you will notice a common feature: both recognise the importance of English. This is despite the fact that the two nations had come under British dominance in the 19th century. China lost a costly Opium War to the English and had to cede large chunks of territory to Britain. Defeat by the English was, however, the beginning of modern wisdom for the Chinese: they picked up the language and now they have beaten the English in science.
The difference in Malysia’s attitude compared to China is stark: in Malaysia, a political decision was made in 1976 to compel English-medium public schools to switch off and teach only in Bahasa Malaysia. A superior approach would have been to double the number of hours devoted to learning of Bahasa Malaysia and to make it compulsory for all students to pass a year-end test paper on Bahasa.
Instead the meme: “We are Malaysians, not British” became a nationalistic rallying cry. Several top political party leaders have led the call by labelling English-language users as being “trapped in a colonial mindset” and are bent on wanting Bahasa Malaysia to be abandoned. But it is they who are trapped in a colonial mindset by erroneously thinking that English is still a colonial language. Britain has ceased to be a world player and the English language has long been taken over by globalists.
Monolingual politicians fail to recognise that while Bahasa is the language of unity, English is the language of opportunity. English is the door to global knowledge and commercial linkages, and is the lingua franca of international business, scientific research, and technological advancement.
You can’t reach world-standard cutting-edge scientific knowledge acquisition nor undertake world-class scientific research without English. This is because the only language into which all written knowledge has been translated into is English. And all scientific, engineering and technological research papers must be written in English to get peer reviews.
Without English, you cannot read manuals for operation of the latest hi-tech agricultural machinery because few people would want to translate them as it would involve a lot of time in double-checking for errors, particularly if translated by AI which undertakes literal translations that often distort the meaning.
Businesses around the world communicate in English because it is highly impractical to wait for translations, as the drag is just non-productive downtime. Cross-border commerce is also conducted in English as traders need to deal in quick time, because time is money to them. You can never expand your business to another country if your staff don’t know English; in any case, you wouldn’t employ graduates who can’t speak English properly.
Anyone who works in a local property company will know that if you can’t speak English you can’t deal with expatriate customers transferred here from other nations, and they would rather deal with another company. You just lose business.
In the world of diplomacy, it is a well-known fact that key words often get mistranslated. Take the English word “competition” that the US State Dept uses in connection with trade relations with China. The translation into one Mandarin character means “conflict.” America comes across as wanting a fight with China. It’s better for the word “competition” to be retained, unless the translator is careful to pick the exactly right translation.
All science subjects in Malaysian schools should be taught in English instead of Bahasa Malaysia or Chinese or Tamil. The point is that any advanced text would have been translated from English and will lack strict accuracy. Students would also have to re-translate their science knowledge back to English for communication with international contacts. Wasteful.
Will teaching science in English weaken non-bumiputra grasp of Bahasa Malaysia? Rubbish. Just talk to any young tourist from China. Speak in English and he will reply in English; speak in Mandarin and he will reply even more eloquently in Mandarin.
Our politicians fail to understand the linguistic power of young minds: their brains have a super-abundance of very active neural connections that are wired to master two or three languages simultaneously.
It’s also time for the Education Ministry to consider abolishing the streaming of secondary school students into science and arts. It creates a gulf between two inter-related categories of knowledge, and the great majority of school leavers enter adult life without knowledge of science to assist them in understanding the world better. It also greatly shrinks the pool of potential scientific talent.
All secondary school students, including the most artistically or religious inclined, must be compelled to pick one science subject for the SPM exam. It helps them to place arts and religion in a broader setting.
We shall continue this discussion in the next article and bring up two essential factors that the Education Ministry has neglected for decades: student nutrition and immersion.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Ipoh Echo
