The Academic Divide

When reading literature in the ESL field, I am often amazed at the tonnes and tonnes of well-researched papers, publications and presentations which address the different issues of language and learning, across the different ages. And then I look at what's happening in schools and language centres and am equally amazed that information doesn't trickle down to the people who need it the most - the decision makers and the end-users. In this case, parents and students...sometimes even teachers themselves.

It's bad enough that practitioners are not aware of or have internalised knowledge published anywhere between 50 to 150 years ago (about learning and about ESL acquisition.) But what's even worse is that billions of dollars is being spent on systems that fail 90% of the time. You might want to check out a comment a reader posted on my other blog which introduced the message of a UN interpreter on the issue of English as the international lingua franca.

I thought this issue was specific to the field of English language learning in Malaysia, because, we are, afterall famous for our lack of initiative and innovativeness in approaching and dealing with problems before they literally landslide and kill us all. But after 2-3 more years of observations, I realized it's not a Malaysian problem; it's a systematic failure that requires a degree in anthropology to begin to understand. (metaphorically speaking.) Barking at the government and lack of direction in Science/Math in English is literally barking up the wrong tree. By the time Malaysians figure out what is what, they will finally accumulate enough second-hand information, case-studies from other systems, to solve a problem which has become irrelevant by then!

This blog isn't about the problems of English language learning in Malaysia. I've written extensively about that in the last five years and the issue has become something of a dead horse to me. I've begun to see that this failure to get the freshest research to the people who need it NOW to do something about it FOR THE FUTURE transcends all disciplines! Back when I was a college student, I thought it was insane that people were studying IT when by the third year of their study, whatever they had studied in their first year had become obsolete. I was particularly aware of this phenomenon because the founder of the college I was attending made it his selling-proposition that he was preparing students who were industry-ready....meaning, the curriculum and teaching were designed to prepare a mindset suited for 10 years ahead. At a time when my other friends still did not know how to use email and the PC to present coloured charts, graphs, images in their projects, we were learning about DTP, computer networking - and using Apple Mac!

Whether I was already someone who could always see the future based on today's information and could extrapolate from my surroundings the message by leaders in their respective industry or it was a by-product of attending that particular college, I can't be certain. But it's starting to get very scary that 15 years after college, the idea of planning ahead based on information from NOW, not the PAST still hadn't caught on!

So, for a while, I blamed academics for not taking it upon themselves to reach the mass audience. This is absolutely critical at a point when information is doubling at an exponential rate; they may no longer have the luxury of publishing a paper once every 5 years because, unless they're incredibly visionary, whatever they had wanted to say in passive sentences would've become ineffective by the time the paper is published and reaches the mass. A book or paper that's published, say, in 2000 would probably only achieve momentum by 2004-2005, taking into consideration, distribution and time to create awareness of the theory being presented.