Lately, Education Minister Muhyiddin Yassin has raised the question of whether English should be made a compulsory pass. He said he was surprised to be told that it was not. "It was very revealing to me," he said.

What’s surprising to me about his statement is that he’s only just made the discovery. And he’s supposed to be the education minister – and the deputy prime minister, to boot! Don’t our government leaders have children? Where do they study?

Note that Muhyiddin has raised it merely as a question – "I want to ask the public …", "We want feedback …", "I have not made any decision on it …" You don’t have to be a CDA (critical discourse analysis) expert to understand the subtext of his discourse. He obviously doesn’t want to upset the ultra-nationalist groups who view English as a threat to the national language despite the fact that enough discerning people have already said that one does not become less Malay, Chinese, Indian, etc, by learning English

Nonetheless, it is an important question. And my answer to it is: Yes, English should be a compulsory pass at SPM! Otherwise, students will not take the language seriously. Fail, fail lah, never mind. I still pass my SPM what? That’s the attitude that has partly caused the standard of our English to go to the dogs.

It all started with the wave of neo-nationalism that began after 1969 which, among other things, relegated English to an almost non grata status. I remember with some pain the years following that – when one felt somewhat unpatriotic for using English in public. Even writers like Muhammad Salleh and Syed Alwi renounced writing in English to reclaim their Malay maruah.

We overdid it, as usual. At the time, it was not foreseen by the legislators that one day, English would become the global language. And then globalisation sneaked up on us, and we suddenly realised we had lost that advantage we had three decades earlier, when we were among the top users of English in at least Asia.

So what was our reaction? We scrambled for quick-fix solutions. But, as most wise people know, such measures don’t quite work. We thought the answer lay partly in producing more English teachers, and so the government lowered the entry requirement at training colleges and some universities. Candidates with as low as a C5 in English at SPM were accepted.

Today, if we were to conduct a survey of our teachers of English in national schools, we would encounter horror stories. Many would be the tales of how teachers who can’t express themselves in English properly to save their own lives are ruining our young by imparting to them the wrong grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and what-have-you.

I’ve heard students recounting how they had to correct their English teachers’ English repeatedly. One memorable account concerns a teacher’s pronunciation. She was said to have told her class: "Chindillela was very pooth thing."

I have also read the writing of lecturers teaching TESL in universities, some of it even published in books and academic journals, and torn my hair out afterwards. Imagine the quality of the English of their charges, who will eventually graduate to teach English.

Then in 2003 came the farce of teaching Science and Maths in English – at a time when the teachers themselves were not equipped to do so or were indeed bad at English. The government threw in the incentive of an extra allowance for teaching S&M (abbreviation pun intended), and in no time, even PE and Agama teachers were taking on the job without, firstly, having had foundation in the subjects and, secondly, proficiency in English. Soon enough, teachers were actually teaching S&M in Malay!

All this seems to smack of Malaysia Boleh! And Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the man who is often credited with coining that slogan, should be held accountable. When he was prime minister, he touted the importance of English but didn’t have the political will to push through a radical change. Teaching S&M in English was the compromise. In 2002, he casually mooted the idea of bringing back English-medium schools, but he never followed it through. Subsequent leaders have shown a similar lack of courage even when they know what the right course is. Pressured several months ago to make a stand on whether S&M would continue to be taught in English, the previous education minister, Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein, was non-committal.

It is clear that politics, unfortunately, is at the base of policy decisions on the teaching of English. By floating the question, Muhyiddin is gingerly testing the waters. Any final decision will be made only when the factions that matter, including the ultra-nationalists, are in agreement with it.

But politics be damned; it’s a big world out there and we can’t live under coconut shells. We need good English to reach beyond our little land. Politics only complicates what is essentially a simple issue.

If English is made a compulsory pass, the implementation of the policy has also to be above politics. It has to be carried out with honesty and in the true spirit of excellence. We cannot have half-past-six teachers misguiding the students. We cannot lower the passing mark for English just to allow more students to get through their SPM as we have been doing for this and other subjects. This would be making a mockery of the whole plan and its purpose. It has to be impressed upon the students that doing well at English is a serious thing that they must take seriously, and if they don’t, they will be failed, pure and simple. The issue of race should also not be considered.

If this cannot be ensured and the government doesn’t have the political will to see it through, then there would be no point in discussing the issue further.

Kee Thuan Chye, recently retired from being a full-time journalist, is an actor, writer and playwright. His latest book March 8: The Day Malaysia Woke Up has been translated into Chinese. Comment: letters@thesundaily.com