Importance of Language

I'll provide some background information. This is an issue happening in my country in Malaysia. Malaysia was colonized by the British till the 31st August 1957 when Malaysia obtained its independence. While Malaysia was under te British colony, all government schools were taught in English.

A few years after independence, the government(consisting of mostly Malays) decides to change the education system. The wanted all government school to teach everything in Malay, that includes, the sciences, math and so on. They did so, because they wanted to preserve their culture. That was until 2003, when they decided to teach the sciences in English, as they realized that Malaysians were falling behind but private schools affected. This was because, many found it difficult to look up online sources and understand them, as majority of information was written in English.

And recently, there has been a debate whether to convert back to Malay(http://www.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2009/2/3/nation/3180435&sec=nation). This issue came up mainly because, the government realized that many of the Malays weren't doing well in their studies as compared to the Non-Malays. The other reason was also because many of the teachers were Malays which didn't have sufficient background in English to teach properly in English.

The result was, many graduate students were jobless becase many companies/enterprises required a good command of english. And this has led to many problems, mainly, the increase in crime rates. One of the most common crimes in Malaysia is 'Snatch thieves'. I'm sure that in other countries there are these types of crimes. But in Malaysia the snatch theives are extremist, mainly consisting of people aged between 20-30 years old. The moderate snatch thieves will either run/ ride a motorcycle and snatch things from their victims. The extreme snatch thieves, will slash their victims, take what they want and let them bleed to death,

Besides that many Malaysian scientist have migrated to other more technologically more advanced countries to pursue their careers and dreams.