"I is from Malaysia. Where is you from?"

So Manek Urai still goes to PAS despite the razor thin 65 votes it obtained against its arch rival, Umno.

In the general election last year, the Islamist party obtained an overwhelming majority of 1,352 votes and the result then had some sort built the confidence of the PAS that it would again topple Umno with similar or even bigger majority in the by-election.

But the prediction went a little bit too far and the 65 votes majority may have sent shivers to the opposition front by now after its sterling performance in last year’s general election and seven by-elections with the exception of Batang Ai.

Kudos definitely must go to the new Prime Minister and his deputy, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin for engineering various positive changes which may have turned the votes against the opposition front in Manek Urai.

The scrapping of the 30 per cent bumiputra equity for companies seeking listing on Bursa Malaysia and the 11 gifts dished out by Datuk Seri Najib in conjunction with his 100th day in office may turn out to be working in favour of the ruling coalition.

Ok, enough praises for the BN in this case as my column today is not about how well BN had done in denying a comfortable victory for PAS in this by-election.

The more pertinent issue other than the Manek Urai or the 11 gifts is the scrapping of the teaching of Science and Mathematics in English

Immediately after the announcement by Tan Sri Muhyiddin who is also the Education Minister on the reversal of the PPSMI policy, it earns immense wrath from the majority public who remains silent.

SMSes were circulated like wild fire few days ago urging the public to cast their opinion on the policy change on the former Prime Minister, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s popular blog.

A quick check on the blog while I am writing this piece reveals that 82,792 respondents were against the reversal of the policy initiated by Tun DR Mahathir before he stepped down in 2003.

Another 13,221 on the other hand said yes to the policy change.

With the decision to switch the teaching of both subjects to Bahasa Malaysia in 2012 with the Chinese and Tamil national-type primary schools entirely in Chinese and Tamil respectively, what would become of the future of the Malaysian kids?

I am not worried about those rich kids whose parents can afford to send them to private schools or English tuitions or even overseas to continue acquiring the English language.

But how about those kids coming from poor family background who have only the national education system to rely on to prepare them for their future?

Well, fair enough that the government realizes the importance of the English language as an international lingua franca.

But how on earth can the hiring of 13,933 teachers and additional teaching time for English in both primary and secondary schools improve the proficiency in the language when the government admitted that many teachers are not even proficient or comfortable with the use of English.

Shouldn’t we be worried about the standard of the new English teacher recruits who went through the Bahasa Malaysia medium with no knowledge of English grammar or structure to teach the kids?

And how the increase of the time allocated to teach the English language can improve the proficiency of the language when a pass in the language is not even required?

I feel extremely outraged by this decision made solely because of political mileage at the expense of the future of Malaysian kids and what Tun Dr Mahathir stated recently that he felt sorry for the Malaysians will be stupid without the English proficiency.

While our neighbouring country, Singapore has long realized the importance of English and prosper with it, our government of the day on the other hand is pedaling backward with such a decision.

Politicians from both divides, I beg to you all to not playing politics in this case as it means the future of the country is being played by you for your selfish reason.

Do the honourable thing by bringing back the English education system at least at the secondary level.

The future of the Malaysian kids is not for you to politicize and theirs is as important as yours who have the privilege to go to private schools and overseas.

“I is from Malaysia. Where is you from?”

That’s the future Malaysian for you.