Riot police have fired tear gas at hundreds of Malaysians who tried to march to the national palace to protest the use of English to teach math and science. The demonstrators wanted to submit a petition to the country's king Saturday to demand that the national Malay language be reinstated in schools for the two subjects. Some school teachers and linguists from the ethnic Malay majority have complained that a six-year-old policy of using English undermines efforts to modernize their mother tongue and to develop a scientific lexicon in Malay, according to a report of Associated Press. The government began a review to evaluate the success of the policy last year.
