PPSMI - > PPSMM (2012)

So, government cancelled the PPSMI? I believe there's a lot of opinions on this. I personally support the idea of PPSMI. It's not just about the english. There's a whole lot of things, considering my experience from my kindergarten until climbing some few steps at the corporate ladder.

For me, I am the product before the implementation of PPSMI. I studied engineering in Multimedia University. I found out it was difficult to translate all those Malay terms to English during the foundation stage. Some of our friend in South Africa manage to understand the concept and explain to us on the physics subject because they learn science in English at their school. The concept is the same thing with what we learn in form 5, but the terms made us confused, hence, that is my reason for my poor grade. :) Hehe...

If we said, Japanese can do it, why we can't? My opinion is simple. Japanese own most of the largest companies. They decide whatever direction they wanted to. But for us, most of the company is foreign company. We work for them. We did not decide, but we have to follow their instructions. Multi-national company (MNC) will always instruct using English, not Malay. If the student graduated the subject in Malay, they will have difficulties in understanding instructions.

What ever I mentioned above was electronics and manufacturing industries (as my career background began there). How about constructions and oil & gas, where we own some companies? My opinion is the same. All these big companies will expand abroad. Especially mid-east, China etc. We still need to employ foreign people at their country. Then, if we just started to convert every terms, the same situation will happened like me communicating with my ex-colleague from Japan last time. Everytime need to press the electronic dictionary. Same goes in finance and banking, accountancy, medical, etc. Please give me the picagari... err.. what is picagari..?? Let me press the dictionary.. (of course this is lousy example. but did you get my point..?)

I strongly agreed with our former PM, Tun Mahathir in their future vision. However, government also have their point. The gap is there. In 5 years time, those who live in town can get good result, hence excellent career in life, while those studied in rural areas don't have this English atmosphere will end up missing their seats at the higher education level.

However, a lot of steps can be taken to strengthen the English gap. Like Tun mentioned, it's not the idea is to be blamed, it's the implementation. PPSMI is not about the statistics of improvement of the subject, the pass-rate, the gap, the difficulties, the lack of quality teachers etc. It's about the future. To do something for the future requires CHANGES. After some CHANGES there will be some PROBLEMS occur. To solve the PROBLEMS we need some SOLUTIONS. To implement the SOLUTIONS we need some CHANGES. And the cycle goes.