While some of us are unhappy over the relocation of SRJK(C) Damansara, few of us are aware of how Chinese schools students suffer under the present system of education.

The students have to learn three vastly different languages, Malay, English and Chinese, right from their first year of formal education. Nowhere else in the world do primary schoolchildren follow this sort of ridiculous curriculum.

It is difficult enough for them to learn both Malay and English at such young age, and Mandarin is not as easy because most of them speak a Chinese dialect at home. They find it hard to pronounce Mandarin words with consonants "zh", "ch", "sh" and "r" because there is no such pronunciation in their own dialect. And they do not understand why the consonants "b", "d" and "g" are pronounced differently in Mandarin and in English.

In many countries, two languages are taught in schools but the result is far from satisfactory. Recently, in one of the states in the United States, the government legislated to discontinue the practice of compulsory bilingual education for Hispanic children for the simple reason that they are unable to master both English and Spanish at the same time. And yet, ironically, there are people in our country who scream to the world that our Chinese-edcuated children are equally good in all the three languages.

The change of medium of instruction is another problem faced by the these schoolchildren. In primary schools they use Chinese as the medium of instruction for all the subjects except Malay and English; in secondary schools it is changed to Malay and Chinese is only taught as one of the subjects.

If they cannot get admitted into one of the universities run by the government, most probably they will use English as the medium of learning when doing their tertiary education in a university overseas or in a local college. I wonder what educational purposes can be achieved by twice changing the medium of instruction.

To be fair, there are quite a lot of Chinese children who do well in schools. These children have to make many sacrifices. Most of them begin all kinds of tuition even before they go to school. And they must be prepared to travel more than 10km to attend a "famous school" if there is none in the vicinity.

To help them master the three languages, some parents go to the extent of changing their "mother tongue" for them. The parents speak to them in Mandarin or English, or both. And they end up ignoring the dialect which was spoken by many generations of their ancestors for more than a thousand years.

Intelligent Chinese children from good family background can get good results under any system of education. But what about children from poor families and children in rural areas?

Not long ago some MCA politicians just "discovered" that the percentage of passes for the subjects of Malay and English is very low in many rural Chinese schools, some as low as zero.

Are we going to do something to help our children? Or are we going to be content just to see a good number of Chinese students who perform well in their examinations and remain oblivious to a large number of them who drop out of the education system? I believe less intelligent and less fortunate Chinese children do deserve something better.