An insult to English language teachers!

         The Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia recently announced that Malaysia needs five years and 60,000 teachers to be trained before English can be made a subject for a compulsory pass at SPM level. What an insult to the present batch of English language teachers in both primary and secondary schools! Have they not been putting their shoulder to the grind in their efforts to get their students to have good language communication skills? Isn’t the government confident enough in their skills even though it has spent thousands of ringgit to get them all to become degree holders? It looks like the government has no confidence in the qualifications that these teachers have obtained from the local universities to make the college-trained teachers graduates. The Deputy Education Minister says that 5000 teachers have already been trained and another 9000 are being trained. Is the Ministry trying to say that all this while they had not equipped the schools under their care with the right personnel for teaching English? Did the teachers now teaching History have to undergo the same rigourous training since History is now a compulsory subject at SPM level?