On the language and authors in BM

1. I was away in Copenhagen attending the WWF Annual Conference, in Den Haag while visiting Nationaal Herbarium at Leiden and Liverpool visiting my sons, daughter-in-law and grandchildren. At Den Haag I met my nephews and nieces.

2. Marina studied microbiology in Dutch and took English as her second language; she speaks both languages fluently. Faisal studied communication, fluent in Dutch, English and Bahasa Kelantan. Mariani studied in Dutch too and took English as her second, she wants to be a environmental lawyer. In addition, she took to Latin, French, Spanish, German, Kelantan and Japanese. Munirah followed suit in IT, fluent in Dutch and English and Fadzli is fluent in Dutch as he is just in high school.

3. While in office to-day I read 15 scientific papers written in Bahasa Malaysia meant for Sains Malaysiana, the top journal of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. The papers are of biological sciences, physics, chemistry, mathematics and engineering science. The Malay authors wrote their papers very well in Bahasa Malaysia, of course with English abstract. I presumed these authors were educated in Bahasa Malaysia as their medium of instruction while in university, as they are not of my generation.

4. My points are:

a) Malay children and Malaysian children can learn and master any language if they start early in their education. Why can't we package our children in primary school with Bahasa Malaysia as theri first language and English as the second language. As they move to secondary school, get them to master another language of their choice, mandarin, french, tamil etc. When they get to college or university, give them another language. Do away with English to teach them mathematics and science subjects, denying the non-science students to be good in English. In the past we had science vs non-science streams and now we have English science stream vs Malay non-science stream. What kind of education system is this?

b) The last generation who studied in Bahasa Malaysia as their medium of instruction did well in their science without neglecting English, as proven by those authors I mentioned above. Furthermore, these authors were educated overseas for their PhDs.

c) Encourage the not-so-young people of 40 to 60 to study another language, especially Arabic, Mandarin or Tamil ...... diversity of Malaysians.