In response to Respect right to mother tongue education, I have to say that while I agree with Dr Soh in that any sort ofchauvinism is wrong, his/her arguments about not needing English to succeed is not tenable.

Citing China, France, Germany, Russia, Japan and South Korea as examples of nations that have succeeded without English is perhaps a little misguided. It is a hackneyed argument that comes up all too often, and I am surprised that no one has bothered to point out the fallacy of it.

First of all, we cannot compare a country like Malaysia with a population of about 23 million people with these countries. For comparison to model nations, countries like the Netherlands or Denmark would be more appropriate. These are countries that have smaller or comparable populations but have done much better than we have. Incidentally, a sizeable part of the populations of these countries are very comfortable with English.

Secondly, the above countries started from different vantage points. Japan started industrialising in the Meiji era, and the Japanese people have a culture of being disciplined and in the last few generations or so, of being workaholics. Are we like that?

They are also extremely receptive of Western influence, and are very open to ideas (especially Western ones). Are we like that?

The German people have a long history of excellence in the Sciences and the Arts. Do we have that too?

Most developed countries have a healthy dose of liberalism. Are we really liberal? Or even want to be?

I don't think so. So we should not even start about not needing English. Saying that we don't need English to succeed because those successful countries did not is a bit myopic and fails to take cognizance of all these other things.

Malaysia is a small country and it needs all the competitive edge it can get. Multinational companies which are here, are here because of the relative political stability, low cost of labour and workers whom they can communicate with reasonably in English.

Malaysia would be more attractive to an investor, than say, Thailand, because of English.

Our demography is such that we don't have all the advantages or success factors of developed nations...do we really want to further add to our list of disadvantages by de-emphasising English?

It may be noteworthy to some readers that English in cosmopolitan Germany (and Western Europe in general, except perhaps France) is very much alive and well.