MOI=EMI+MMI?

The UPSR result is out. Datuk Hisham says it has to be looked into carefully before we can say anything definite, but tentatively, he is giving the thumbs up for the teaching of math and science in English.

Now we are told, that the results are going to be further pored over by a host of experts. Meanwhile there is mounting pressure on him to revert to BM, to avoid the National Language being “sidelined”.

We wait with bated breath and hope that the decision will favour the future of our children. However, there is a bigger consideration, and that is we must act in favour of our country’s future.

Is our mind battling with our heart on this?

I say, our children are the future of this country, and we hold their future in our hands. And that perhaps is the singular merit of being parents.

Public education policy is a strategic vehicle to achieve social and cultural integration. It is politics-driven. That’s the reality of it. Eventually, the Minister will act on the best of intentions and advice, but on a quest this far-reaching , it is the imperative thing to ensure that there can be more than just one path to achieve our goals.

What actually are we aiming for? Is it to have a more educated population, or a population who can speak English? What I have read so far is that there is an overwhelming view that the idea is to achieve both, and some are using specious logic to assert that by teaching math and science in the English language we will have a more English-speaking population.

I think those two things are entirely separate, and that is the key to our discourse. Teaching math and science in primary school has more to do with cognition than with communications.

Basically, cognitive development, is about teaching our children to think, and in primary level especially, to develop their natural intelligence. This will only be possible if the child and teacher speak a common language.

To learn to speak English is about communicating with others, and this, all teachers will agree, needs a different set of approach altogether.

It will be a grave error on our part and a cruel injustice to our children, to bear the weight of an adult’s wishful thinking that they can accomplish both at the same time. It would give an ironic meaning to the proverb: to kill two birds with one stone.

Japan became a developed country long before it decided to have an English-speaking citizenry by embarking on an annual spending of USD322 million in 1987. (Look up their JET program).

Their education policy became a success an envy of many. Of course they have a conscious policy of training a cosmopolitan elite both as its buffer , and a conduit for assimilating and digesting foreign ideas to be recast and developed on their national mould. But more importantly, their system was pitched to the highest standards. The only Asian University in the Top 20 U’s in the world is Japanese.

Learning science and mathematics is an absolute must, but it remains of little benefit if it is not geared to achieve world class excellence. The worst thing we can do is to teach them in English to a child who is a total stranger to it.

There is a more tragic outcome of teaching math and science in English to a kid in say, Kampung Nasakot in Ranau, who has no TV or radio, and has never seen an orang putih, and that is creation of social stratification for his race, which we want so much to avoid. We can also later, chose to say, that they have a very low IQ in the first place. Whoever does that has a place in hell reserved for him.

What I am saying is that let us be more judicial in which place we have to introduce the policy of English to teach math and science to. If the child knows only Malay, let it be Malay, if it is Chinese let it be Chinese. If Dusun, let it be Dusun.

But I know, and I believe that Malay is an adequate language for that purpose, but I disagree if we must restrict ourselves to that language alone.

If we want so much to think forward of one day being able to teach math and science in English only, then there is no choice but to adopt it as the medium of instructions for all our schools.

Economic development is a function of other strategic policies and not dependent on language alone. Let us don’t deceive ourselves in believing that without English we cannot develop.

English is an important communication tool. But let us first make our children smart, then whatever language they choose to speak in, their genius will shine through.

KK's New Art Gallery

(A letter to the Daily Express)

I read Richard Sokial’s piece (DE 10^th Nov, “Have A Contest..”) on the proposed new art gallery for KK and I agree that we need to think through a lot of things aside for its final design.

KK city is growing more beautiful by the day and the addition of a (beautiful, I hope) new art gallery  would be  a wonderful addition to that evolving beauty. But more than that, a new building is surely  the government’s indication of a new advocacy of enhancing the role of the arts in the life of our community.

The central role of an art gallery is the physical role as a temple of the arts. But  the value of a new gallery cannot be measured by the the amount of money put into it, but by the sum total of the civilizing values generated by what an art gallery should truly be.

Art is evolving in all its forms , and I agree with saudara Richard that the design must address all the needs of all the art forms. It cannot be just an empty space but must be accomodative of say, big formats, installations, multi media and other non-traditional art forms.

We have also to address the needs of the artist community, not just in its creative aspect but perhaps more importantly the commercial aspect, for artists also need to eat just like the rest of us, and they need both a conducive and a supportive environment to flourish. Paintings and the other art forms, I think, should eventually be sold, and this is where we should think of ways to encourage the presence of art dealers. It is a fact that paintings are mostly sold by networking and not through galleries.   Paintings and other media expressions get sold mostly by networking between dealers, artists and galleries.  

The imperative of a new building is that it should immediately be an address which will  attract artists from all over the world to come and exhibit their works. In developed countries, art galleries are important tourist destinations.  Because of this we need to design activities to cater to diverse needs of both the artists and the public.

Perhaps low  budget allocations are limiting the activities of our present  art gallery.  If that is so, we can rethink how our RM10 million can be better spent.  A purely static display gallery will not do much to attract viewers or tourists. We have to engage the public and encourage artists to think of new ways to reach more people.  We need to organise more art fairs in different locations. Perhaps we can also sponsor deserving  artists to participate  overseas like the Sydney Art Fair, to expose them to a wider audience  and as a learning experience.

Commercial or personal galleries are still very much nascent in Sabah, and the role of government is therefor even more important and crucial to give impetus to this important activity.

Because of the limited local market and  probably because of lack of capital, we have yet to see artists  reach out to more people by creating  cross breed venues, just like internet cafes, or have them in gift, furniture, antique or clothing shops. Interestingly, the present art gallery is described as  “temporarily housed in the Science Centre of the Sabah Museum”. (Look up the Sabah Art Gallery Homepage). We should call it the Art and Science Museum to celebrate the fact that scientists can appreciate art, or that some scientists are artists.

 Art does not belong in a separate compartment of a person’s life. Hopefully it should be an essential component of a civilized person’s way of life. A new art gallery for Kota Kinabalu is  very important. It should be the much needed soul of a thriving  city . In that respect, RM10 million seems to me a paltry sum.

GET THE BUFFALOES OFF THE ROAD

It is generally agreed that the meat of free-ranging chicken is very much healthier than that from the cooped-up variety.

The free ranging mode of rearing chicken is perhaps the easiest way since chicken, like pigeons, know how to find their way home. You just leave them on their own, even ranging further than they should, at the risk of life and limb. They will be home by nightfall, except those who have met their fate on the road.

You just have to be a little bit more observant to realize that all domesticated animals in Sabah share this same wayward spirit. Buffaloes, cows, horses, goats, sheep, dogs and cats. Every motorist, probably without exception, would have run over a chicken, a cat or a dog as soon as they get a license to drive a motor vehicle.

These animals don’t belong on our roads. The owners are inconsiderate, and the authorities must be guilty of dereliction of their duties to let this go on.

My late mother was seventy-five years old when she was hit by a cow which has strayed into our compound. She had to be confined in bed for a month, suffering from shock and physical pain. The cow is still out there, and no one is feeling guilty.

I know of a motorcyclist who hit a buffalo lying in the middle of the road. He was thrown off right in the direction of an oncoming car. His death roused the villagers to impose some controls on the roving cows and buffaloes. But now it is back to how it was previously. One death should be more than enough. Cows and buffaloes don’t belong on our roads.

My mother died of old age five years after the incident. What is painful is that she treated the incident with the cow as something natural. Having cows and buffaloes roaming all over the place is the accepted thing. Perhaps if we still had our herd of buffaloes, we would be like all the other inconsiderate owners.

There are already obvious reasons why we should be doing something about stray animals. For one their stinky shits are more than enough to turn tourists off. They disrupt traffic and they damage vegetation.

There is a Malay proverb that says that it is easier to take care of buffaloes, than taking care of people. Or is it the other way round?

The Politics of Crowds

America is a different land, for me exceptional in all the ways that matter. In recent days, those vast Obama crowds, though, have recalled for me the politics of charisma that wrecked Arab and Muslim societies. A leader does not have to say much, or be much. The crowd is left to its most powerful possession -- its imagination.

... Read it all here

Muslim Soldier Fought for America and his Faith

By Nancy A. Youssef

WASHINGTON — "Joe the Plumber" was only one of two Americans injected into thepresidential election this past week. The other was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan , whom former Secretary of State Colin Powell invoked in his endorsement Sunday of Barack Obama .

 Khan was a 20-year-old soldier from Manahawkin, N.J. , who wanted to enlist in the Army from the time he was 10. He was an all-American boy who visited Disney World after he completed his training at Fort Benning, Ga. , and made his comrades in Iraq watch "Saving Private Ryan" every week. 

He was also a Muslim who joined the military, his father said, in part to show his countrymen that not all Muslims are terrorists.

 "He was an American soldier first," said his father, Feroze Khan . "But he also looked at fighting in this war as fighting for his faith. He was fighting radicalism."

 Khan was killed by an improvised explosive device in August 2007 along with four other soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter while searching a house in Baqouba, Iraq . He's one of four Muslims who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and are buried in Arlington National Cemetery , where 512 troops from those wars now rest.

 About 3,700 of the U.S. military's 1.4 million troops are Muslims, according to Defense Department estimates.

 Khan, a child of immigrant parents from Trinidad , was 14 when the Sept. 11 attacks happened. Feroze Khan said he remembered his son watching in stunned silence: "I could tell that inside a lot of things were going through his head." 

Three years later, Feroze honored his son's request and allowed him to enlist him in the Army . "I told him: 'You are going to the Army .' I never said there is a war going on in a Muslim country. I didn't want him to get any ideas that he was fighting (against) his religion."

 Feroze kept his fears for his son's safety to himself.

 His son was assigned to the Stryker Brigade Combat Team out of Fort Lewis, Wash. , deployed to Iraq in 2006 and fought on Baghdad's Haifa Street , a Sunni insurgent stronghold.

 His tour was extended as part of the surge of additional U.S. forces to Iraq , and he called or messaged home often until he was deployed to restiveDiyala province, where he was under fire too often to contact home regularly. But he prayed every day, his father said.

 One Sunday morning, his son sent an instant message: "Hey Dad. Are you there?" Feroze Khan was out, and he saw the message when he returned. A few hours later, his ex-wife called. Soldiers had knocked on her door in Maryland .

 Their only child was dead. A few minutes later, soldiers appeared at Khan's door. "I guess it helped that I knew beforehand," he said. "There are no words to describe it."

 Kareem Khan was a month from finishing his tour when he was killed.

On Sunday, Powell said that Khan's sacrifice and service had swayed him to discuss the way that Muslims have been portrayed in the presidential campaign, and the contention that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is a Muslim.

 Obama "is a Christian," Powell said. "He has always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, 'What if he is?' Is there something wrong with being Muslim in this country? The answer is no. That is not America." He added: "I am troubled that within the (Republican) Party we have these kinds of expressions" suggesting that Obama is a Muslim, and that if he is, he likely associates with terrorists.

 Powell said that he felt strongly about the issue after he saw a photo of Khan's tombstone in the New Yorker magazine . In the black-and-white picture, Khan's mother is resting her head on her son's tombstone. On each side of the stone are flowers, and in between is a copy of the Quran. On the face of the tombstone is a crescent and star, indicating that the soldier buried there is a Muslim.

 "He was an American," Powell said. 

Read more about it in The New Yorker

WILL APPOINTING A LOCAL HEAD SUFFICE?

I read with much interest the column by Datuk Stan Yee (DE 19 October), entitled, “ Will appointing a local head suffice”?

The topic of locals heading federal departments had generated some heat recently, and I was hoping he would hit the point. But after reading his meandering prose, I am led to conclude that somehow  we cannot trust  Sabahans to head federal departments because they would be too beholden to their federal bosses. In other words, he missed the point altogether.

In the first place, there is no policy that federal departments  must be headed by officers from Semenanjung.  Period. 

Secondly, administrative policies, ultimately, must serve to answer local needs, and being beholden to the central bosses does not arise.

Sadly, we must put most of  the blame on Sabahans for what is happening now because, being a former federal officer, I remember well the time in the early 70’s when a lot of federal posts were going begging. There were too few Sabahan graduates, and those in Semenanjung were reluctant to come to Sabah because we were considered then, an ulu place.

A great number of Sabah graduates who were given federal scholarships abandoned their respective federal postings. Who could blame them, for at that time, the expatriate heads of departments were just leaving, and there were opportunities of  speedy promotions.

Some of us persevered in federal postings, and though the perks were not as good as in the State service, it did not turn out too bad for most of us. At the tender age of twenty-six years  and three months, I was already head of department holding Superscale “F” post,  because there was nobody else around. There were also other Sabahans then,  holding  head posts in Telecoms, Customs and the Medical Department, to name a few.

I remember too, the concerted effort of the Federal Establishment Officer to ensure as many Sabahan filled vacant posts, and special fast-tracking exercises were done for officers with good potentials.

By the late 70’s federal vacancies  were practically nil, and the so-called integration exercise has been put in place. From then on all vacancies were filled on a competitive basis.

There was also a time when the RTM needed a Director, and a state officer was loaned out to then for a few years. It showed the state establishment office and its federal counterpart were acting in concert to address the state’s administrative needs.

There were some forward-oriented internal policies of some federal departments, notably the Telecoms which filled jobs with Sabahans after giving them  scholarships to pursue engineering degrees overseas. They were superb fellows. I remember while still in school that children of these officers bring me to their homes to meet their parents and they would treat me like I was one their children.

What we have now is a consequence of failing to subsume our practices to the values and needs of the people.

However, there is a tendency of things to work out in ways that reveal the truth behind reality, and the reality is that  officers from Semenanjung cannot be trusted to head federal departments, because they would  naturally be beholden to different  socio-cultural norms. Some make it worse by allowing  even their lowest posts to be filled by people from Semenanjung Malaysia.

Now is the time to make things right, not because we like our peninsula brothers less but because we love a stable Malaysia more.  This can only happen when the administrative machineries are in sync with the real needs of the locals.

I believe that once this problem is recognized, the state leadership will know what to do. For the moment I would like to propose that all incoming non Sabahan federal heads must undergo a structured orientation period. Secondly, all non-graduate posts for all federal departments  must  be filled by qualified Sabahans within five years.

WHAT IS A BRIDGE FOR?

Source: Daily Express 10 October 2008. Page 7. Caption: " Tenom School Kids at Risk".

(Note: See the car in the background? I wonder how it will cross the bridge)

We are talking 2008. Quite honestly, things like this cannot be. But this is likely the norm here in Sabah.  Why is this so? That's the question begging a reply. Or rather, a long reply.

Why are we not able to mend a small bridge? Part of the answer is that just to replace 23 bridges on main (Federal) roads we need RM205 million ( Daily Express 11th October). There is a total of 166 such bridges.  Then there are state roads, municipal roads and village roads... just imagine the numbers of bridges needed, they could be in the thousands. 

Why aren't we getting the money needed to build and repair roads so that our kids can go to school safely?. First of course is the money, rather the lack of it. Sabahans are a patient lot, and I think because most of the rural people do not realise that other places in Malaysia have better roads and bridges. What you don't know wont hurt you.

Second, is the fact, that most Malaysians, usually the pensinsular kind, especially the politicians, do not realize that Sabah is probably 30 times the size of Malacca, and for which reason they are prone to treat Sabah as just one of the small peninsular states.

Children take these infrastructural shortcoming in their strides. Crossing broken bridges, walking on slippery muddy earth roads, and crossing turbid rivers, are great fun, and  just the things that make up the norm of a laid-back rural life. But adults should know better.

The Curious Case of The Family Who Ate Toad Eggs

I refer to the Malaysiakini article Kota Marudu needs more than wireless Internet

I read Dr Hams letter and cannot help but agree with many of his observations. I worked in Sabah for over seven years as a house officer and medical officer. After my housemanship, I was sent to Ranau to serve in the district hospital. What Dr Hams described in Kota Marudu is not something isolated to that district alone in Sabah . It is an often repeated story in the whole of Sabah .

My first introduction to the poverty in Sabah came during my first months there, when a sweet 70- year-old lady from Kota Marudu was sent to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital with deep jaundice. She lived alone in a small village off Kota Marudu and noticed the jaundice about a month before.

 

She had no money for the taxi fare and so waited a month to sell off her chickens to have enough money to pay RM50 for the transport to Kota Marudu Hospital. She had to walk two miles to get to the road to get to the taxi.

Having been born, bred and educated in Peninsular Malaysia, I was shocked.

When she arrived, she was septic and had a gallstone lodged in her common bile duct. The stone was duly removed but she was found to have a heart problem that required a pacemaker. We arranged for her to get a permanent pacemaker but she refused.

 

When I pressed her for her reason, she told me that she couldn't afford to buy batteries for the pacemaker, having sold off her chickens. Once I explained to her that the batteries would last for years and we would provide them, she agreed to the pacemaker.

 

Ranau town itself has roads and is on the main highway between Sandakan and Kota Kinabalu. It developed primarily as a result of the Mamut Copper Mines in the district. However, highway in this context means a two lane road with frequent landslides and potholes, with a two-hour drive to Kota Kinabalu.

 

Outside Ranau, transportation becomes a problem as tarred roads disappear to become gravel or crudely marked logging trails. Anyone who has worked in Sabah would have the same stories to tell, of extreme poverty and poor transportation.

 

During my 2 years in Ranau, I've heard and seen it all, patients with cerebral malaria, a condition unheard of in Peninsular Malaysia, coming in after 48 hours to the hospital from places like Kaingaran and Karagasan, with relatives having to push the 'pirate taxi' through the mud, spending RM50 on fare during the monsoon season, the equivalent of 2 months income, this too when petrol was only around RM1.20 a litre in Ranau.

 

Patients having to delay treatment for life threatening conditions because a bridge washed away along the trail (I won't even call it a road) to Tambunan. Emergency surgery such as caesarian sections, appendectomies and even ectopic pregnancies had to be performed in our little district hospitals by Medical Officers with little more than 4 months housemanship experience.

 

Medical emergencies such as myocardial infarctions, which in Peninsular Malaysia would be managed in a Coronary Care Unit setting, had to be managed in the district hospital level. I'm grateful however, that my staff in that hospital were the best I've ever had the pleasure of working with and were dedicated enough to want to make a difference in their patients' lives.

 

But poor transportation does not only affect the access to healthcare. Having no roads to be able to transport their agricultural produce for sale means that these people are stuck in a never ending cycle of poverty.

 

At most, some of them get RM20 to RM50 by selling their produce to middlemen to be sold at the monthly tamu or market at prices that are perhaps only 10 percent of the value of the goods. These innocent people are also preyed upon by traveling cloth merchants, mostly foreigners, who offer them 'easy payment schemes' to buy cloth for clothes, and when they cannot pay for the cloth and the interest accumulates, they end up having to marry their daughters to these men, who often have wives back home in Pakistan .

 

One of the cases I could never forget was of the family who came to Ranau Hospital just as I was leaving, a family who had failed crops, were hungry and unable to get food. The father collected some toad eggs and fed them to the whole family in a desperate attempt to stave off hunger. When they arrived at our little emergency room, one of the children were dead and two passed away within 10 minutes of arrival in our casualty unit due to poisoning.

 

Education is a problem in parts of Sabah outside major towns like Kota Kinabalu at the moment. Many children would be lucky to be able to get to a school or even afford to get to one. Most of my patients outside Ranau were lucky to even have a primary school education and a vast number of women marry in their teens.

 

I've had 14 year olds delivering babies in Ranau, most of them have ever ever stepped foot in a school. The education level is so poor that many women feed their children condensed milk thinking that it's better than breast milk.

 

But at the heart of it all, these mothers want the best for their children but are not empowered with the knowledge to help them. Major towns in Sabah have electricity courtesy of the Sabah Electricity Board, but smaller villages have either diesel generators or rely on candles or lamps when night falls.

 

How can children study in these conditions? Like many doctors in the districts, I had to learn Dusun to communicate better with these patients who could speak little else.

 

Forty five years after the formation of Malaysia , the promise of a better life for these poor Dusun, Murut and Rungus patients in the districts of Sabah is a pipe dream at best. How can our politicians claim to have brought development to the state and have neglected these poor people, many of whom still wear the cheap t-shirts and caps given free by political parties from many elections ago.

 

How can I claim to be proud of Putrajaya with it's beautiful bridges and lamp posts and the Petronas twin Towers when our fellow Malaysians in Sabah are so neglected?

 

The cycle of poverty and illiteracy one sees in the districts in Sabah brings despair to the heart. Eradication of poverty must tackle the real issues of education and transport and not just handouts to poor people. By all means, declare Sept 16th a public holiday, but remember it in it's real context, where we made a promise to our brethren in Sabah and Sarawak to treat them as equals in Malaysia , and give them the development they've been long denied.

Another Doctor | Sep 8, 08 5:11pm

Source    http://www.malaysiakini.com/letters/en/8