Recently, Education Minister Mr Ng Eng Hen has inflamed the heartlands with his proposal of a controversial language policy. This policy involves the lowering of the weightage of the Mother Tongue at PSLE from the traditional 25% of the total to a slightly lower percentage.
The reason he gave was, he observed that his son struggled to learn it to the detriment of other subjects. The second was, he reasoned that other countries did not have such stringent language requirements for mother tongue at primary school level.
So now, because your son had problems learning Chinese, you think it is only right that you should make mother tongue less important for other "kentangs" like yourself. Because you are a Chinese person but did not learn your mother tongue well, you think it should count for less because you can't teach your son how to speak the language of his ancestors.
Hey, you know what? I know a lot of kids who have problems learning English too, because their families speak Chinese at home. Can I apply to lower the weightage for English too?
Mr Education Minister, first, you institute a policy that makes a simpler version of the Mother Tongue syllabus available for those who are weaker in the language, now you want to dilute the importance of the Mother Tongue further, by telling people its okay to focus on other subjects because really, you shouldn't be wasting so much time trying to communicate with other members of your own race.
I am getting very convinced that there are certain people up there who spend all their time in ivory towers and have no idea of what the ground sentiment is like. With such a policy, who are you really benefiting? Other rich, English speaking families like yourself, or the heartlander families who speak their mother tongues at home?
Such a policy is controversial not just because it is a misguided attempt at reducing the importance of MT in our society, but also because it benefits a certain class of society a lot more than others. It helps the rich English speaking lobby to keep their children in elite schools, while making it more difficult for heartlanders to get into the same schools, because the traditional advantage of the heartlanders, their fluency in MT, is now eroded as a competitive advantage. I find this extremely disgusting.
Other countries may not require such stringent requirements to determine who are our best and brightest at primary school level, but in Singapore we do. Singapore is land scarce, and as a result, school scarce. The best schools can take only so many, and we have to ensure that it is truly the best of students that make it to those schools. It may be sad, it may be stressful, but this is the result of living in a country where we have little except the talents of our people, and whatever we make out of life we have because we worked and fought for it.
People overseas may not get why we are such a serious people, uptight, competitive and driven, but try living in a country where entry in favoured schools is not a given right but a privilege, and you start to understand the collective psyche of "survival" and "scarcity" that underpins the Singaporean mentality. Why else do you think we have the terms "kiasu" and "kiasi"?
If children in schools are struggling to learn the language, it is not just the failure of families in not teaching their children properly. The problem also lies in the syllabus and methods of teaching, which the government is very subtly diverting our attention away from so as to not draw attention to the fact that even after so many years, we still have not found a good way to teach our kids how to speak two languages effectively.
Learning a language is hard work, and should not be taken lightly. However, people in Switzerland can speak three languages, and I know many other people who can speak that number too. Granted not everyone has the aptitude to learn so many languages, but surely two is not beyond the ability of most people.
I did not enjoy learning Chinese growing up. I had tuition sessions, I stayed behind in school, I rewrote my essays and I had to live with the bad grades that inevitably came my way because I was competing against Chinese scholars. But today I am glad that I went through all that because I can read a Chinese newspaper, which is one of the hardest things to read on a daily basis in Chinese.
Of course, with this being Singapore, I guess I had better brush up my English skills, because that's all people are going to be speaking in 10 years.