Much against my father’s wishes, my mother enrolled me in an English-medium school, the first in the family. Prior to this, my older brothers and sisters were enrolled in a Tamil-medium school.

In addition to the additional one year "remove" to "catch-up" with the English-medium secondary school system, I saw how they (my brothers/sisters) faced difficulties in adapting to a totally different environment from their primary school days.

All of them did not make beyond the then Senior Cambridge even though they did study hard but their primary years in a Tamil-medium school, as I realised then, had ill-prepared them for their secondary education.

There are those who had come from similar backgrounds and have excelled in their academic pursuits, one such example that I know of being the late Datuk K Pathmanaban. Quite frankly, such seems to be the exception than the norm.

From the foregoing, I was convinced that my children would and should not face the same predicament as my family members faced. However, it also became amply clear to me that the then standard of secondary education was no more and where Malay, as our official language, has replaced English as the medium of instruction.

To my horror, those of whom I had come across during my personal and working life, having their education in a national school could hardly string a sentence in English correctly. This jolted me a bit as I have exposed my children from the day they started talking to both Malay and English.

It was also my conviction then that notwithstanding this setback, I would still send my children to national schools, since we speak almost entirely in English at home and this would more than compensate any lack of the subject in their school.

Despite my wife’s assertion, who is from a Chinese background, that I send them to a Chinese school, I explained to her that the years of education in national schools had given us the opportunity to mix with the different races and one outcome of that gift has been our different race/culture-based marriage.

However, as we were contemplating registering my son in a national school that we started hearing of the gradual Islamisation in national schools. A friend of mine who was a member in the PTA (parent-teacher association) related to me as to how the headmaster of a school had quite often, in reply to his queries, mentioned that he had to refer to a particular ‘ustazah’, which had irritated my friend.

So, I checked with some of my teacher friends, and while the above-quoted incident appeared to be an isolated one, nonetheless the Islamisation has indeed made an impact in national schools. Assemblies, for instance, were started with Islamic salutations, much to the disregard of the non-Muslim students. With a heavy heart, I finally agreed with my wife’s proposal to send all my children to a Chinese school.

While I see the point that Professor Khoo Kay Kim made on this issue, quite apart from what Mukhriz Mahathir said, which almost anyone would agree was a politically motivated statement. I share the same concern with the learned professor that national integration is important but national schools must be made conducive, devoid of any religious connotations.

After all, with Islamic schools around, anyone wishing to pursue Islamic-based education could go to these schools. A national school should be a place where children of all races/religions are able to learn and understand each other and our different faiths, as we did in our good old days where all of us learnt even in our primary schools about the major religions, without emphasis on any individual race or religion. The understanding, cooperation and tolerance among the products of such a system is even talked about these days.

When our children pursued their secondary education in national schools, we had another problem. The standard was pathetic and I was concerned when my son, instead of "learning", was memorising and was on an auto mode.

If, again, learning Malay as our national language is important, how it would play out later was what we found out rather late, when the time came for university education. The love for the language which has been banged into our heads hardly mattered at that stage. What mattered was race. Never mind that one had done well in Bahasa Malaysia but at the end of the day it boils down to race.

So, what Mukhriz says is nothing more than a cheap shot at his political ascension. We have this insidious feeling (I may be wrong) that we have been trapped into a situation where we will be unceremoniously cast out, based on race and not on the knowledge of BM or their educational merits. Perhaps, this could be one of the main reasons for our polarised society.

Well, my children were lucky. In addition to their strong grasp of the national language, their knowledge of English, both written and spoken has been very good, and that they decided to pursue their educational interests elsewhere. As parents, we are happy that our keen sense in exposing my children to English has indeed given them a new lease of life.

Today, they hardly use Malay in their workplace and being the lingua franca of the business world, English had served them well. Irrespective of whether a child is a Malay, Indian, Chinese or of any other race, it is important for them to learn English.

As we learn Malay as our national language, we should not lose sight, with cheap publicity stunts, that the hallmark of a developed nation is how it aligns its commercial interests with that of the world. Isn't the Chinese so enthusiastic in learning English. English-speaking India today has done well economically, topping the outsourced market and other pioneer pursuits.

Maybe, the leader of a tiny country called Singapore had the wisdom of forsaking the language of the majority (Chinese) and had the foresight to press for the English language. The vernacular schools that insisted on continuing met with natural deaths in the following years.

Was this not our own experience when many non-Malays preferred English education to their own mother tongue and vernacular schools were fast dwindling. Now, they seem to have got a new lease of life and their classrooms are brimming with numbers.

Our deputy PM (Najib Razak) speaks impeccable English. The education minister (Hishammuddin Hussein) is no exception. It used to be joy hearing Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah speak in English. I used to be elated to hear our first PM (Tunku Abdul Rahman) speak, especially when he read the independence declaration in English. Has anyone heard Tengku Ahmad Rithaudeen speak in English (publicy) lately? The kind of ‘Queens’ English he used to speak had mesmerised me.

Well, none of them became any lesser a Malay but why, in their selfishness, deemed it fit that they had availed themselves to that language that they could not see fit that the other citizens, too, should have that advantage?

Those who can afford to send their children to international schools, like many of our leaders, have usually given up on national schools but for the vast majority, it is business as usual, oblivious to the changing world and the challenges that come with it.