That former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad continues to egg the government to reinstate the English language as a medium of instruction for teaching Science and Mathematics in schools is both a given and mystifying.
A given because the language of global technology, as he correctly asserted even in his first stint as premier (1981–2003), is couched in knowledge not indigenous to Bahasa Malaysia. Then there's the mystifying aspect of Dr Mahathir's insistence.
The obvious question is, why did it take him eons to redo it? English was a school platform for learning Science and Mathematics until 1979, before lapsing from the curriculum.
Dr Mahathir could have steamrolled the policy much earlier, but he only realised it in 2003, at the close of his premiership. The government abolished the policy in 2012 out of defectiveness and embarrassment after discovering that teachers were "mixing" Bahasa Malaysia and even Mandarin with English in pragmatic-like instructions.
Only four per cent of teachers used English exclusively and switching languages was instinctive: students didn't understand basic Math or Science concepts in English.
Dr Mahathir could have still steamrolled the policy in his second stint as prime minister, if not for the concerted pushback from non-governmental organisations and Malay literary figures, who insisted that the focus should be on improving the teaching of English.
Ultimately, the politics of tribalism and self-interest offered Dr Mahathir no wiggle room. If that's the case, how are things any different now?
Globally, English gifts its students a supreme advantage. India is a stupendous example where English is highly prioritised in education and the country uncannily factory-assembles a prodigious number of scientists and engineers for the world.
So good are the Indian technologists that they are primed and hired to manage the planet's tech behemoths like Microsoft and Google. For Malaysia, reading, writing, speaking and communicating in English is a dusty aberration, a supremacy relegated as a historical footnote. So, what are our options?
Perhaps the idea of schools as the ploughing field of English instruction in Science and Mathematics is not yet expendable.
Already, generations of graduates — while not immersed in the airs of Oxbridge, Shakespeare and the Queen's (now King's) English — are familiar with their special relations, the American pop culture of the Internet, movies, TV shows, light-reading and, above all, "Manglish", the English 101 for practical communication seduced by the rise of social media. Our English familiarity is more ebullience than competence.
Malay language warriors, in all their talk of language purity, aren't so pure after all, "borrowing" English words and phrases to spice up their speeches and dissertations out of convenience, pretension and laziness.
The younger generation is already soaked in American-British pop culture — in the way they talk, write and even think. We dearly hope that this grasp of "English" is good enough when dealing with more complex tech lingo and knowledge.
As it stands now, this may be inevitable: the Bahasa Malaysia we know now is so riddled in English that learning it is the most practical method to actually learn English.