I refer to the letter How English-medium schools vanished overnight .

I am surprised at how naive the author is to assume that then Education Minister Rahman Yaakub by his own accord and volition could arbitrarily 'take a gamble that fateful day in July or August 1969 - and succeed beyond his wildest dreams'.

As narrated by Pin Pan Dan, Dr Mahathir Mohamad's scurrilous letter played a vital role which subsequently led to Tunku Abdul Rahman stepping down. But history also revealed that Razak played no less a role in the removal of Tunku.

To give full credit solely to Rahman for converting all English-medium schools to Malay-medium is both naive and illogical. For such a momentous change of the education policy, surely it would be more feasible to presume that the directive originated from Abdul Razak, the prime minister then.

I find the writer's statement 'Out of the blue, Rahman announced the conversion ... from Jan 1,1970 ' to be very simplistic and illogical. There is no way Rahman could on his own accord make the change from English-medium to Malay-medium without receiving the orders from Razak. In this regard, Rahman was merely the agent to execute Razak's intention.

By the writer's own admission, Rahman would not have been able to do what he did if Tunku was still the PM. By the same token, it can be said that Rahman could not have done what he did had he not got the concurrence and instructions from Razak. And, of course, Rahman was adequately rewarded when he became the chief minister of Sarawak in 1970.

To conclude for Pin Pan Dan's benefit, when Razak was the education minister in 1950, Tunku was the PM and it was unlikely the former would allow Razak to make any change in the schools' medium of instruction.

So the next best thing Razak was able to do was to convert Chinese-medium secondary schools to English-medium. This does not in any way negate Razak's role in being instrumental in changing the medium of instruction for schools from English to Malay when he became the PM.