“certainly primary schools must be in the child’s mother-tongue”
Are you aware of any successful country, anywhere, that sponsors this? This is exactly wrong. A child’s ‘mother-tongue’ being a foreign language after 3 generations is a pitiful failure of integration and nation building.

Lim Kit Siang’s call for government support for Chinese Schools in Malaysia should probably be seen in light of his long career at the head of what most people perceive as a Chauvinist Chinese Party. regardless of his personal attitudes towards many Malaysian hot topics, I expect he represents some powerful interests and also benefits from the support of well-established lobby groups. If he sometimes deviates from “Malaysian Malaysia” or “LKS for Malaysia”, we must concede that he is not a totally free agent.

Hardly anything, besides perhaps the construction of giant concentration camps complete with gas chambers, could be further from a contribution to building a unified nation than government support for foreign-language schooling. Malaysia is ruined by racism and powerful self-interest groups. Any small contribution towards the reinforcement of those groups should be avoided at all costs.

Who is in any doubt that it is the ability of the educators in the Chong Hwa school which brings their results, and not the medium of instruction? What self-respecting professional would lift a finger to further the interests of an apartheid regime of which they are doomed to remain a second-class citizen? We do not need changes that further cement the structures of racism in this country.

We need the skills and dedication of those educators to be made available to Malaysians of all ancestries. The only way to do that, as far as I can see, is to do away with the racist constraints that the framers of the Constitution themselves objected to. It is UMNO and their cronies who have deviated from the letter and spirit of the original Constitution. Malaysia’s Rulers went on record to say that they did not want communal bias in the Constitution. The preservation and extension of communal bias cannot be presented as anything other than a betrayal of those noble intentions.

There is no country where racism is not a threat to stability and harmony. Almost every other country who has tackled racism in their societies has done it by outlawing racism – or if they tried to deal with it by becoming even more racist, as Malaysia tried, it ended badly. ‘Multi-culturalism’ is nothing more than a cynical political ploy to manage a population as distinct voting blocs. There is nothing more retrogressive than a government enforcing countably many ways of being on its people, whether that number is 1 or 20. Such a technique can be profitable in the short term when a nation is faced by an external threat, but militating as it does against people’s nature to fully explore every last opportunity available to them, will eventually cause internal conflict. What any of us may perceive as ‘multi-culturalism’ is merely the consequence of migration and people’s freedom to make different choices regarding tradition, habit and custom. When we might be tempted to think ‘multi-culturalism’ we should instead think “ooh look: people making different choices and sometimes forming ephemeral groups around those choices”. It is only natural, and should be left undisturbed.

Malaysia is a nation with a rich heritage contributed by people of diverse backgrounds. It has an official language which also happens to be the first language of the majority of its people. A common language unites a nation, but it can’t do it alone. The Malaysian prospect of ‘pretending’ to be united at school only to face rejection by one’s own government afterwards is unbearable (I am still convinced that the figures for people who can no longer bear the absurdity and cruelty of Malaysian citizenship will show that Malaysians of all origins are equally sensitive to the wrong perpetrated on them). Race-based policies and politics must go, and must go soon.

As far as teaching goes, the #1 priority should be on making the skills and experience of teachers at excellent schools available to all Malaysians as a national project. Supporting the establishment of an aggravating enclave is not the way to do it. The way to do it is to treat those Malaysian citizens as excellent Malaysian citizens and give them the rewards their excellence deserves. More funding for second class citizens in an apartheid regime would be a very hollow victory indeed.

Since the Chinese Schools have done so well on Independent funding, there appears to be no rational argument for giving them government financial support. If anything, financial support from our government appears to the ‘kiss of death’ to almost any venture. I could not credibly pretend to support English as the ideal medium of instruction in Malaysian schools. My bias is apparent. People have fond memories of English-medium instruction in Malaysia, but I am tempted to think that it was technique, content, and outlook they remember rather than choice of language.

I think the Malaysian National Schools system must be based on Bahasa Malaysia – nothing else will deliver an integrated nation while preserving its heritage. At the same time, students must be free to dream that they can become the Prime Minister with the full support of all of their friends and neighbours, regardless of where their grandfathers came from, if they excel in their studies. The cancer of racism must be cut out in its entirety from Malaysia and methods put in place to limit its effect wherever it attempts to take hold.

My proposal would be to make Mandarin, Tamil and English (or ‘the top 3’ whatever they are might be more future-proof) official languages (with BM as national language) of Malaysia, and to make all official documents available in all 4 languages, and to ensure that all government offices above a certain size has an officer on duty who is fluent in each (or all) official languages.

I don’t think anybody in PR will argue that the civil service would need more staff for such a change – either it’s overstaffed or it isn’t. Even if it isn’t, if we are to believe PR proposals for a more efficient civil service, either you need to confess that that means redundancies, or offer an alternative project those staff may be employed in.

I think it’s not unrealistic to promote or even fund ‘centres of excellence’ in foreign-language education. If die-hard Chinese educators wish to establish Chinese Academies of recognisable excellence for post-secondary, continuing or private tuition, I think it would be unreasonable for (any other) government to refuse to support them to some extent.

Of course, none of these things are likely to come to pass. We have a nascent 2-party system, thanks to overwhelming support for ‘something different’. Perhaps predictably, the Pakatan is formalising its coalition by dropping anything of value that might give a voter hope for a brighter future. Given the route they’ve chosen, I think their method is unavoidable. But what of hope and the principled voter? Where does it leave them – other than on the 16:35 Refugee Airlines to Michigan?

I beg LKS to consider sponsoring (even just in words) a new political party – he doesn’t even have to be a member of it. He can be a ‘mentor’. He’s a good politician, but his hands are tied by his traditional support. The ‘1Malaysia’ campaign may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Najib has run a fantastic advertising campaign for a product he doesn’t have.

I’ve often thought a new political party (preferably fronted by younger Malaysians, though not by overt discrimination) should be formed under a generic banner, and my top tip would be United National Organisation – UNO (if you can fund a BM name that adds up to SATU, also good). They could have a logo which was a ‘1’ or a silhouette of Malaysia. The marketing is already in place, there’s demand for it, all we need is the product. Rather than try to work out the details after the fact – as with PR, build it from principles from the ground up: take the UDHR as a basis and the original intent of the Malay rulers and the Reid Commission at Independence. No discrimination of any kind. Total transparency in funding and dealing with issues.

As I understand it, PSM is not a member of PR, but it seems as though you don’t run against them in constituencies where they’re likely to win a seat. That suggests to me that you have at least some expectation that they would form a government with you if the chance arose. You could do the same thing with UNO / SATU. It would be a bit of a hot-seat, because many great, perfectly-normal-in-any-other-country manifesto points that would be good for UNO are ‘sensitive’ here. You could invest your higher principles in UNO, while PR keeps the expediency.

There has to be some hope in Malaysia for people who are not brain-dead. Your Pakatan Rakyat coalition is having to shed attractive principles by the day in order to find common ground. Please don’t just discard them, and invest them in a new project instead. I still expect you will win at GE13, but what sensible person is going to look forward to a Pyrrhic victory?

lkt-56

The Switzerland reference you posted is talking about the mother-tongue of new arrivals in pre-school classes. Switzerland is a special case: its cantons are like Malaysian States, but the locals may speak French in one canton, Italian in the next, German in another, or Swiss (Romansch? Can’t recall…). The cantons are not just separated by languages, but by snow-capped mountains larger than any in Malaysia.

I think I posted before about getting lost in a blizzard in Switzerland on a walking holiday and descending from the mountain into the ‘wrong’ valley. I had badly frostbitten heels and couldn’t walk out for a week. The phrasebook I brought, intending to work on my language skills, was German. The Valley was French-speaking. My French is only slightly better than my German, which is terrible. While I was limping around the very pretty village in the beautiful valley I found myself in, I did at least get some extra help from the old woman in the Tourism office. I said to her, by mistake, that she was “very pretty” instead of “very kind”. The place I ate at every day was the ‘Hotel International’. It had a sign on the door saying “No English Spoken”.

What that article is talking about is the extra help given to new arrivals whose mother-tongue is not local. But they’re being taught the local dialect. If such a situation were to occur here, there would first have to be an earthquake in the South China Sea which threw up a mountain range over which the PRC army would come, annexe Malaysia and subsequently magnanimously force the LKT family to learn Bahasa Malaysia because it was the local dialect of Malaixia province.

As for the teaching of two technical subjects in a different language, I think the Malaysian experience might be unique among education systems anywhere. I am still agog that anybody would consider it a good idea.

While I could be tempted to believe that children being taught in their mother-tongue might have a slight advantage over those taught in a language their mother did not speak, I think it’s important to balance this putative advantage against the disadvantages of preserving their foreign-ness, maintaining a greater number of school systems, and in the long-term, the consequence that you’re perpetuating a problem. And let’s not beat about the bush – any reduction in ability to communicate with one’s neighbours is a problem. I should know – I’m British!

I agree with Loh in as much as the vernacular schools did not cause the current racial disharmony in Malaysia, that they’re excellent education establishments, and their students are fortunate to have been educated in them. They do nothing to bring the races (such as they are) closer together however, when a single decent school system (impossible under our present leadership) could. I think it’s important to acknowledge that ethnic enclaves can come about because they’re of unarguable benefit to their constituents. Do we acknowledge this benefit as a reason to further consolidate the enclave or as an excuse that pretends the wider and longer term problems caused by segregation don’t exist? Maybe we won’t agree on the answer to this question.