Mother tongue is the best teaching medium.
It enables students to comprehend the contents of the curriculum using the language with which they feel most comfortable. So, why are parents and students so upset when they are assigned to a Chinese language teaching-medium secondary school? The reality is that fluent English is a must for fresh graduates looking for jobs. Parents are worried that using Chinese language as the teaching medium could threaten their children's English skills. This will not necessarily happen. It is up to these Chinese medium-of-instruction schools to ensure that their students standard of English is as good as that of students at English-medium schools.
Parents are also concerned that the effect of the Government's policy and the way that it has been implemented, is that the English language schools will be considered to be in an elite class. They will feel that mother tongue has been deemed appropriate for less able students. This has led to a diminution of confidence in mother-tongue teaching, even though mother-tongue education should be our ultimate education goal.
Why not enforce mother-tongue teaching in all government schools? We should also be asking which schools our senior officials' children are studying at. Are they Chinese-medium schools? If not, why not? These questions, some of the commonest asked by parents, have strong implications, but they have never been seriously answered by our decision makers.
The whole case seems to be that nowadays our decision-makers do not care about the views of those who are directly affected by those very decisions.
PAUL SHEN Kowloon