Ex-judge: Vernacular schools offend Constitution

SJKC and SJKT labels are divisive, says controversy-courting former justice Mohd Noor.

KUALA LUMPUR: Former Appeals Court judge Mohd Noor Abdullah has called for the integration of vernacular schools into the national school system, saying their separateness was offensive to the Federal Constitution.

Delivering a lecture organised by the Muslim Consumers Association today, he also suggested that the existing vernacular schools—officially known as “national-type schools”—should be changed into schools that teach pupils to gain proficiency in their mother tongues as opposed to using them as media of instruction for other school subjects.

“We should remove the labels of SJKC and SJKT; they are divisive,” he said. SJKC and SJKT are the Malay abbreviations for National-Type School (Chinese) and National-Type School (Tamil).

Noor came under the media spotlight a week after the 13th general election, when he called for the defence of Malay rights.

“The result of the 13th general election and the Chinese tsunami shows that the Chinese have forgotten about the bond established 55 years ago. Expect a backlash from the Malays,” he had said then at forum organised by the Federation of Peninsula Malay Students and the UiTM Alumni Association.

In today’s lecture, he noted that the government, while aiding Chinese and Tamil schools, had not done the same for Malayalee, Telugu, Kadazan and Iban schools. He said this amounted to racial discrimination.

He criticised politicians who advocate mother-tongue education, saying they had failed to understand Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, which establishes Malay as the national language.

A subsection of the article states that no individual can be prohibited from using, teaching and learning other languages and another subsection gives the government the right to preserve and sustain the use and study of the language of any community.

According to Noor, the constitution allows the study of languages, but not the study of other school subjects in languages other than Malay.

As such, he added, the national education policy was against Article 152.