The Malaysian Insight

THE window for establishing a single national school system was closed in 1957, said former Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin yesterday, adding that Malaysians have to move forward with the current set-up of multiple languages and streams.

Khairy, long considered a moderate voice in the Malay nationalist party, said abolishing the vernacular system would be a “policy nightmare” now.

Instead, Malaysians should focus on making national schools as the institution of choice for parents and pupils, he said.

The Rembau MP differs from many of his party’s supporters, who have long believed that the country’s Mandarin and Tamil vernacular schools, are an obstacle to national unity.

Umno ally PAS also said vernacular schools are a barrier to social cohesion recently.

“If we want a single education system, we should have done it in 1957 or 1963, but the terms of our union allowed vernacular schools.

“Once you have allowed it, it is difficult to undo,” Khairy said in a public talk at the Jeffrey Cheah Institute on Southeast Asia.

The Beyond 2020, Fresh Views, New Visions talk featured Khairy, and Pakatan Harapan leaders Liew Chin Tong and Nurul Izzah Anwar, who debated the policies Malaysia needed beyond 2020, past Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s Vision 2020 plan.

“If today, somebody said ‘we have one single education system’, which means no more Chinese, Tamil schools, another person will come and say ‘how about your madrasah and sekolah pondok (private Islamic schools)? You have to get rid of them, too’.

“What about parents who send their kids to international and private schools?” Khairy responded to a member of the audience who asked whether vernacular schools should be maintained.

“It is a policy nightmare, not to mention nightmare in terms of politics, I believe it is a non-starter.”

The better goal, Khairy said, would be to make national schools so good that parents would prefer them over other types of school.

“So that is what we have to do, I don’t know how to get there, that is a real moon shot, the Mars-shot, if you ask me right now.”

Liew, who is deputy defence minister, said distrust of vernacular schools could be solved if Malaysians stopped distrusting people who spoke multiple languages and embraced all the major tongues as the nation’s cultural heritage.

National schools could also be the school of choice if they started teaching multiple languages and were multicultural, said Liew, who is also DAP political education bureau director.

He added that some Chinese primary schools are becoming more “national” in character as the population of non-Chinese pupils starts to outnumber the Chinese.

“The point is: once we no longer fear each other’s language, once we no longer fear each other, but we see that these languages are a heritage of our nation, when we can speak multiple languages, then the question of single schools won’t arise,” Liew added. – August 20, 2019.