Thursday, July 9, 2009

Gooch, In Malaysia, English Ban Raises Fears for Future

10iht-malay.html?ref=world

Access 7/9/09

In Malaysia, English Ban Raises Fears for Future

Bazuki Muhammad/Reuters

Students attended a morning session at a school in Putrajaya, Malaysia on Thursday.

By LIZ GOOCH

Published: July 9, 2009

KUALA LUMPUR — P.S. Han, a teacher in Kuala Lumpur, has been using English to teach math and physics to 17-year-olds for the past six years.

From 2012, he will be forced to return to using the national language, Bahasa Malaysia, after the government decided to abandon English for the two subjects in a decision some consider to be motivated by politics rather than education.

“English has been used as the language of science for 300 years,” said Mr. Han, a teacher at St. John’s Institution. “You cannot really convey the scientific concepts to the students in Bahasa Malaysia at a very high level.”

“We have to face the fact that science knowledge is in English.”

The announcement on Wednesday, which came after months of lobbying by Malay nationalists, has raised concerns about whether English standards in the former British colony will slide and whether Malaysia’s competitiveness as a destination for multinational companies may suffer.

English has been the language of instruction for math and science in Malaysia since 2003, when former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad introduced the policy amid concerns that poor English skills were hindering students’ job opportunities.

Mr. Mahathir expressed sadness over the decision to revert to Bahasa Malaysia, saying that the decision would adversely affect children and make it difficult for them to keep abreast of scientific developments, the national news agency Bernama quoted him as saying.

The government cited a decline in students’ math and science grades, particularly in rural areas, as one of the reasons behind the switch.

However, Khoo Kay Kim, emeritus professor of Malaysian history at the University of Malaysia, said that teachers had not been adequately trained before the policy was introduced.

He described Malaysia’s English standards as “pathetic.”

“Fewer and fewer of our professors can now write in English,” he said. “We used to lead Asia in terms of English, and now we have allowed ourselves to slip below other Asian countries.”

Mr. Khoo said it was a “national shame” that the country’s oldest university, the University of Malaysia, had fallen behind other Asian universities in international rankings, a trend he attributed to declining English standards.

He also raised concerns that poor English standards may affect Malaysia’s international competitiveness, saying that multinational companies may struggle to find graduates with good English.

“If less and less Malaysians know English, how are multinational companies going to come into this country?” he said. “If we don’t have the workforce who can fit into multinational companies, how are they going to come here?”

Malaysia’s business community has long been concerned about the reported decline in English standards in schools. “The business community feels that English is imperative for Malaysia’s international competitiveness,” said Michael Yeoh, chief executive the Asian Strategy and Leadership Institute, an independent research organization.

Mr. Yeoh said that more needed to be done to improve English standards, but questions remained over whether teaching science and math in English was the best method.

“We don’t really know exactly how this could impede on the study of English,” he said.

The Malaysian International Chamber of Commerce and Industry welcomed the government’s decision to increase the number of English teachers and teaching hours.

Its executive director, Stewart Forbes, said that the need to emphasize English must continue to be part of the government’s policy.

“Private sector companies in Malaysia continue to complain about graduates’ communication skills in general, and English skills in particular, and the government’s efforts to raise the level of English expertise are very worthwhile,” he said.

Some educators from Malaysia’s two largest minority groups, the Chinese and Indian communities, welcomed the decision to revert to using Chinese and Tamil for science and math in vernacular schools, local media reported.

However, many parents and the National Union of the Teaching Profession have expressed concern over the decision to scrap English.

Shazlin Aidani, a mother of three, said she wanted her children to learn math and science in English.

“When they graduate and go to work everything will be in English, not Bahasa,” she said.

Bearak, "World Cup in Africa Stumbles Over Strike"

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/world/africa/09safrica.html?em

Access: 7/8/09

World Cup in Africa Stumbles Over Strike

Jon Hrusa/European Pressphoto Agency

Striking construction workers marched in Johannesburg on Wednesday. The nationwide strike could threaten the 2010 World Cup.

By BARRY BEARAK

Published: July 8, 2009

JOHANNESBURG — Thousands of South African construction workers walked off their jobs on Wednesday, beginning a nationwide strike that could threaten the biggest event in international soccer, the 2010 World Cup.

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Joao Silva for The New York Times

Construction workers demonstrated Wednesday outside the grounds of Soccer City in Johannesburg, where the finals of the World Cup are to be played next June.

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Joao Silva for The New York Times

Soccer City, above, is one of 10 stadiums being built or renovated for the 2010 World Cup, the first to be held in Africa.

However important the tournament may be to fans of the game, it represents nothing less than a defining moment for South Africa, the first country on the continent selected to host such a major sports competition.

Work on 10 stadiums — five new ones and five under renovation — is supposed to be complete by December, well in advance of the games to be played next June. This nation’s self-esteem is on the line, with $75 billion in building projects under way, including upgrades to airports and highways.

“We’re all proud to be working on a World Cup site, but pride does not fill your family’s stomach,” said Martin Baloyi, a 42-year-old laborer who laid aside his tools Wednesday afternoon at Soccer City, the behemoth of a stadium here in Johannesburg where the finals are scheduled to be played.

For several months, two unions representing 70,000 construction workers have been negotiating a revised deal with a consortium of employers known as the South African Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors. Most of the laborers earn about $1.75 an hour, and the unions are asking for an increase of 13 percent.

The companies have countered with a 10.4 percent offer, while publicly complaining that union demands include a costly set of enhanced benefits, like a meal allowance, payment for days lost because of bad weather and four months’ maternity leave.

“This package all adds up to a 50 percent increase in costs, and on top of that is the 13 percent in wages, so you are looking at 63 or 65 percent extra, and that’s way too much,” said Joe Campanella, a spokesman for the consortium.

A lengthy strike would not only embarrass South Africans as their country primps for an event expected to draw 450,000 visitors, but would also be a huge failure for the new government. Jacob Zuma ascended to the presidency with a mighty boost from the trade unions. The extent of his assistance to labor now will be seen as a measure of payback for that support.

President Zuma is in Italy attending the Group of 8 summit meeting, which includes leaders from some developing nations. But his labor minister has called for an urgent meeting on Thursday, bringing together chief executives of the biggest companies involved, civic overseers of the World Cup and leaders of the two unions, the National Union of Mineworkers and the Building Construction and Allied Workers Union.

“Bottom line, I think they’ll come up with some agreement sooner rather than later,” said Udesh Pillay, head of a research project tracking South Africa’s preparations for next year’s World Cup, a 32-team tournament.

Mr. Campanella, the spokesman for the construction companies, said: “If a strike goes on for a month, we’re in trouble. If it goes on a couple of days, maybe not.”

The workers, of course, have a powerful hammer in any job action that threatens the World Cup. Bhekani Ngcobo, a union negotiator, said the strike would go on until all demands were met, “even if that comes in 2011.” The labor stoppage also includes work on the Gautrain, a rail link between Johannesburg and Pretoria, scheduled for completion next year.

But there is no strike fund, and very few of the construction workers have enough savings to forfeit a payday. “Some of us can afford to stay out two days, some not even that,” said a concrete handler, Richard Bizela. “The landlord doesn’t care about strikes. He just wants his money.”

Though South Africa boasts the continent’s biggest economy, its unemployment rate recently shot up to 23.5 percent, and tens of thousands of union jobs have been lost to the global recession.

Unions have been agitating for more state intervention in the economy, pushing for an ambitious industrial policy that might generate jobs. The Congress of South African Trade Unions, or Cosatu, is part of Mr. Zuma’s governing alliance. Nevertheless, its leader, Zwelinzima Vavi, has warned that delays in pay increases for government workers “could unleash explosive spates of uncontrollable labor unrest.”

On Wednesday, Cosatu issued a statement saying its members were “100 percent behind their comrades in the construction sector,” arguing that a strike for a 13 percent pay increase was justifiable in view of rising food prices and a 31.3 percent rise in electricity rates that went into effect last week.

Monday, July 6, 2009

GIRIDHARADAS, Farewell to an India I Hardly Knew

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/weekinreview/05giridharadas.html?ref=world

Access: 7/6/09

THE WORLD

Farewell to an India I Hardly Knew

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

COMINGS AND GOINGS A Calcutta bus reflects confidence among Indians. Much has changed in a generation.

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Published: July 4, 2009

MUMBAI, India — The first thing I ever learned about India was that my parents had chosen to leave it.

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The country was lost to us in America, where I was born. It had to be assembled in my mind, from the fragments of anecdotes and regular journeys east.

Now, six years after returning to the country my parents left, as I prepare to depart it myself, the mind goes back to the beginning, to my earliest pictures of it.

India, reflected from afar, was late-night phone calls with the news of death. It was calling back relatives who could not afford to call you. It was Hindu ceremonies with saffron and Kit Kat bars on a silver platter.

India, consumed on our visits back, was being fetched from the airport and cooked a meal even in the dead of night. It was sideways hugs that strove to avoid breast contact. It was the chauvinism of uncles who asked about my dreams and ignored my sister’s.

It was wrong, yet easy, to feel that we did India a favor by coming home. We packed our suitcases with things they couldn’t get for themselves: Jif peanut butter, Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Gap khakis. These imports sketched a subtle hierarchy in which they were the wanting relatives and we their benefactors.

My cousins in India would sometimes ask if I was Indian or American. I saw that their self-esteem depended on my answer. “American,” I would say, because it was the truth, and because I felt that to say otherwise would be to accept a lower berth in the world.

What it meant to be American was to be free to invent yourself, to belong to a family and a society in which destiny was believed to be human-made.

I looked around in India and saw everyone in their boxes, not coming fully into their own, replicating lives lived before. If only they came to America, I told myself, so-and-so would be a millionaire entrepreneur; so-and-so would be as confident in her opinions as her husband; so-and-sos’ marriage would be more like my parents’, with verve and swing-dancing lessons and bedtime crossword puzzles; so-and-so would study history and literature, not just bankable practicalities.

I moved to India six years ago in an effort to understand it on my own terms, to render mine what had until then only belonged to my parents.

India was changing when I arrived and has changed dramatically, viscerally, improbably in these 2,000 days: farms giving way to factories; ultra-cheap cars being built; companies buying out rivals abroad. But the greatest change I have witnessed is elsewhere. It is in the mind: Indians now know that they don’t have to leave, as my parents left, to have their personal revolutions.

It took me time to see. At first, my old lenses were still in place — India the frustrating, difficult country — and so I saw only the things I had ever seen.

But as I traveled the land, the data did not fit the framework. The children of the lower castes were hoisting themselves up one diploma and training program at a time. The women were becoming breadwinners through microcredit and decentralized manufacturing. The young people were finding in their cellphones a first zone of individual identity. The couples were ending marriages no matter what “society” thinks, then finding love again. The vegetarians were embracing meat and meat-eaters were turning vegetarian, defining themselves by taste and faith, not caste.

Indians from languorous villages to pulsating cities were making difficult new choices to die other than where they were born, to pursue vocations not their father’s, to live lives imagined within their own skulls. And it was addictive, this improbable rush of hope.

The shift is only just beginning. Most Indians still live impossibly grim lives. Trickle down, here more than most places, is slow. But it is a shift in psychologies, and you rarely meet an Indian untouched by it.

Grabbing hold of their destinies, these Indians became the unlikely cousins of my own immigrant parents in America: restless, ambitious, with dreams vivid only to themselves. But my parents had sought to beat the odds in a bad system, to be statistical flukes that got away.

What has changed since they left is a systemic lifting of the odds for those who stay. It is a milestone in any nation’s life when leaving becomes a choice, not a necessity.

My parents watch me from their perch outside Washington, D.C., and marvel at history’s sense of irony: a son who ended up inventing himself in the country they left, who has written of the self-inventing swagger of a rising generation of Indians, in a country where “self” was once a vulgar word.

At times, my mother wonders if they should have remained, should have waited for their own country’s revolution instead of crashing another’s. And as I leave India now I can only wonder how history would have turned out if the ocean of change had come a generation earlier.

Because it came between their generation and mine, the premise of our family story has been pulled out from beneath us. We are American citizens now, my family, and proudly so. But we must face that we are Americans because of a choice prompted by truths that history has undone. They were true at the choice’s making; in India, I saw their truth boil slowly away.

They don’t crave our mayonnaise and khakis anymore. They no longer angrily berate America, because they are too busy building their own country. Indian accents are now cooler than British ones. No one asks if I feel Indian or American. How delicious to see that unconcern. How fortunate to live in a land you needn’t leave to become your fullest possible self.

And how wondrous, in this time of revolutions, to have had my own here.

I grew up in America defining myself by the soil under my feet, not by the blood in my veins. The soil I shared with everyone else; the blood made me unbearably different. Before I loved India, I loathed it. But that feeling seems now like a relic from a buried past.

I leave now on the journey’s next stretch, with sadness and with joy, humbled by India, grateful to have been at the revolution and to have known the revolutions within.

Dialogue on Cosmopolitanism and Globalization