English-o-phobia Malaysian and Indonesia Style.

In the quarter of a century that I have spent teaching English, I have heard numerous excuses for not learning to master the English language from my student.  I am perplexed as to how some cannot even form simple sentence after being exposed to the language regularly for more than twelve years but that is life, so we persevere.  At times, teaching English can be rewarding also.  Students not knowing to speak, read or write in English does not annoy me at all. After all, they are students and they were in my class to learn. If they were already near-native users of English, I could be out of a job.  It is when people who are supposed to be contributing positively to education come up with anti-English nonsense that I get annoyed.

In a conference in Bandung, an Indonesian academician, a lecturer no less, said that in Indonesia they have lots of languages with small speech communities.  If they were to adopt English, these languages would die out.  This happened only a few weeks ago and I wrote about it in my entry about the trip (see earlier entry).  The naiveté of this “educator” is astounding.  If you want to preserve a language beyond the demise of its speakers, record it and spread information about it. The best way to do this is in English.  You can even bring the language to international recognition if you give it the exposure that they need.  To do that, the world needs to understand your explanations about the language. For that you need English.  I think by rejecting English, you are contributing to sending these languages to oblivion.  Languages dies because no one speaks it  any more or when their speakers abandon them because they can no longer convey their reality.  And, that lecturer seemed to have missed the fact that the world’s lingua franca today is not some obscure tribal from Java but a much less obscure language of the tribes of England called English.

In the 1990s, a student of mine at UKM, called English the language of the infidels.  I think I have mentioned this in a blog entry some time back.  He called in “Bahasa Kafir”.  So, I told him to go count the number of books written by Muslim writers on Islam in English and compare that to the number of books written by Muslim writers on Islam in Malay.  One student, a friend of the former, did actually go to the library and had a look at the books inventory.  He admitted that I was right.  The student who made the comment refused to learn from that and subsequently failed.

Even more recently, an officer of the Gombak education office called English ‘Bahasa Penjajah” in a gathering of school teachers at the capitol.  It has been more than half a century since we achieved independence and there are still these ignoramuses around.  This so called educationist is certainly ignorant because he does not seem to realize the role the English language played in gaining our independence.  We achieved our independence through negotiations with the colonizers: the English.  Those negotiations happened between our founding fathers and representatives of the Empire both here and in London.  Our founding fathers were English educated. I seriously doubt that they negotiated in Malay, Cantonese, Iban or Tamil.  To gain that independence, there were numerous agreements that needed to be ratified between the colonizers and the fledgling government. Go to the National Archives and read those documents, they are not in Malay. Certainly, Malay became the national language but the language that made the negotiations possible was English.  If anything, English was the element that made our independence possible.  To have an educationist go in front of experienced teachers and call English, “Bahasa Penjajah” makes my tooth ache.

When will these people learn that we need the English language if we want to do anything today, be it engage in international trade, do dakwah or even bring your grouses to the international crowd.