Losing a Headstart: English

I am called again to review this matter.

To refresh your minds, please follow the link below:-
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/world/asia/09iht-malay.html

Politics aside, I would like to speak up as an employer assessing an employee for employment. Normally, I dont look at their grades or what or where they studied .... but I would ask this questions:-
1) How good is your English?
2) Can you speak any other languages, apart from Bahasa?
3) How good is your computer skills?
4) Can you work independantly
5) How creative are you? Prove to me

Prophet Muhammad once said "Look for knowledge even though you have to go to China". Think about it again, Arabs going to China? Don't they have to learn the language first - both spoken and written? I was told that you need to know at least 1,000 Chinese characters to read a newspaper. I wonder how many characters you need to know to read academic books? Hummn! And, we Malaysians are still struggling with English

During the 15th centuries, the Arabs were already well known scholars in Algebra, Astronomy, Science and Medical. Hundreds of books were published in Arabic. Guess who translated them into Latin and other European languages? They were the unheralded priests who spend hours learning Arabic and translating the books. From then, they started to develop more rationalization and eventually created a new European civilization. And, yet we Malaysians are still struggling with basic English

I remember in 1987, one of my teachers instructed my dear friend, "Fariz, you went to the teacher's room to collect the books"! Hummn! That was my dear teacher. God bless you for teaching me what not to do when communicating in English!

The fact is ... learning science and math in English will give us the first hand information and exposure to the knowledge. I don't know any books or universities in the world that teaches how to make an aeroplane, or a submarine, or a rocket, or a car in Malay. Mostly they were taught in English and Russian. Mandarin is another important language to know. The Chinese has thousands of years of knowledge trapped in books. And, yet we Malaysians are still struggling with basic English!

We had a headstart before when the British colonized us. All formal education were taught in English. I still can recall my late grandfather, prefering the New Straits Times vs the Utusan Jawi. But why did we lose the head start when we achieved the independance? We should be more advance by now, if only ....blah! blah! blah!

P/S
Can you detect how many grammatical mistakes that I have in this blog? I am one example of a man losing "the headstart". Hummn! And ... Sad to say but I am also still struggling with basic English, sigh!