DR Mahathir Mohamad as education minister? That is a deja vu moment as much as the nonagenarian politician being the prime minister. But there it is, Malaysia lives in interesting times.

The fact of the matter is there is no one in Pakatan Harapan with the heft to change the course of the Malaysian education system like Dr Mahathir. That is, if he can go around the coalition promise that the prime minister cannot hold any other portfolio.

Anwar Ibrahim, Najib Razak, Muhyiddin Yassin and Hishammuddin Hussein have done a poor job as education ministers as they were wearing their Umno hats.

This is the most politicised ministry in the Barisan Nasional cabinet and perhaps in PH, too.

Warlords and entrenched powers in the new government would have eaten an inexperienced hand for breakfast, especially as Anwar has yet to be elected to parliament or made a senator while Muhyiddin is now home minister.

When he was the education minister in 1974 until 1978, Dr Mahathir implemented the Rahman report that led to change in medium of instruction from English to Bahasa Malaysia, starting with the 1975 academic year.

Also one of his first acts as minister was exerting greater government control over Malaysia’s universities, over objections from the academic community. He limited politics in university campuses, with power to discipline students and academics who were politically active, and making scholarships for students conditional on the avoidance of politics.

But he mellowed at the end of his tenure as prime minister in 2003, calling for science and mathematics to be taught in English in government schools. That move, however, was not widely accepted by Umno warlords who insisted on Bahasa Malaysia as the only medium of instruction in schools.

In a critique of the education system in late 2014, Dr Mahathir observed that the social-economic disparity in Malaysia will grow bigger, with rich parents enrolling their children in international schools and abroad to study English, while the poor are left behind in national and vernacular schools.

In his popular chedet.cc blog, he said the country’s races were already separated as a result of the government’s efforts to cater to all ethnic groups by having Bahasa Malaysia, Mandarin and Tamil as the formal languages for learning in schools, and this has been worsened by the proliferation of English-medium international and private schools.

That Dr Mahathir blog post pointed out that most employers currently favour English speakers and this puts children from poor families at a severe disadvantage.

His return to the Education Ministry is seen as the final battle to ensure Malaysia and Malaysians can regain a better education system that used to produce those who made the country progress from a colonial backwater into a top 20 nation. – May 18, 2018.