‘Stop brainwashing students’

Sarawak DAP is demanding that stern action is taken against teachers who utter insensitive remarks to their students.

KUCHING: Sarawak DAP has slammed the Education Ministry for not prioritising the amendments to history books which had resulted in the Malaysian teaching fraternity being infected by racist teachers spawned from the system.

It blammed the government’s failure to severely reprimand and take action against teachers, who in the past, had mouthed racial slurs against students, as the reason behind the continued occurences of such incidents.

“In the past they have not taken action against teachers who uttered racist remarks. Instead one teacher was transferred and worst still, promoted.

“What lesson is there to learn from this?,” asked Chong who is Bandar Kuching MP.

Chong was commenting on complaints from the parents of five Form Five students from Tun Razak college here in Kuching-Serian Road.

The students were suspended from school on Aug 5 because they argued with a teacher who had called them ‘stupid’ and told them to ‘go back to China’ because they were not fluent in Bahasa Malaysia.

The remarks were uttered in the presence of other teachers and school prefects.

The students were suspended for between one and two weeks. The students were informed of their suspension by the disciplinary teacher who told them that it was because they failed to do their history homework and for quarrelling with the teacher.

Systematic manipulation

Condemning the teacher for the uncalled for remarks, Chong said: “I think such a mentality is the result of the systematic manipulation of the contents of the history subject in the school over the past 20 or 30 years with implications that Chinese are foreigners in this land.

“We want to categorically stress that Malaysia was formed in 1963. But Chinese have been here for more than few hundred years.

“Malaysia was formed through the efforts of the three major races in Malaya, and Dayaks in Sarawak and Kadazan-Dusun in Sabah.

“I, myself, was born here, this is my country and nobody has the right to ask us to go back to China.”

Chong, who is also Kota Sentosa assemblyman, is demanding that the Education Ministry take stern action against the teachers who made such statements.

“If the Najib administration is serious about the 1Malaysia campaign, not only stern action must be taken, but the contents of the history subject in school must be reviewed.

“History must recognise the contributions of all races in the formation of Malaysia,” he said.

Chong said that one clear example was the development of Kuala Lumpur which was previously attributed to Yap Ah Loi.

“Now Yap Ah Loi’s name does not appear in the list anymore, so we must stop this brainwashing of our future generations.