Politicisation of schools dividing instead of uniting country

Our politicians' quest for unity through the school system has had the opposite effect of driving Malaysian society further apart, said Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (Ideas) CEO Wan Saiful Wan Jan.

Using the debate over vernacular schools and the Malay language as a national language as an example, he said Bahasa Malaysia is being imposed as the unifying language although English would be more suitable.

"Isn't it an irony when we say that the Malay language can be a uniting language, but we have a conference on national unity in English?" he said, drawing laughter from the 200-odd audience at the ‘Education as a leveller or divider?' forum yesterday.

He added that he has at least one meeting a month with government officials in Putrajaya and all of them had been conducted in English, while MPs often sought permission from the speaker during parliamentary debates to use some English terms and phrases.

Wan Saiful (above) said he would like to see vernacular schools flourish because matters of education, including its medium of instruction, are best left to the parents to decide rather than "distant policymakers in Putrajaya".

Until the administration of schools are decentralised and taken away from the politicians, he said any talk of instilling unity through schools would be divisive.

"It is not education that divides us. It is the politicking behind the education system that divides us...

"We have to remember that politicians have a vested interest in making people support them, and this is the problem that we have when politicians are given so much power to decide the future of our children," he said.

'Cinemas no place for Negaraku'

On a related issue, he said the government should not have required cinemas to play the national anthem prior to the screening of movies, pointing out that even cabinet meetings do not kick off with ministers singing ‘Negaraku'.

"The reality is that people go to cinemas to relax and watch movies, not to go through the formalities of standing up and singing (the national anthem)," he said when asked to elaborate after the forum.

Meanwhile at the same forum, Shah Alam MP Khalid Samad (right) said if schools did serve to unify the country, Pakatan Rakyat would have won the elections "hands down".

"Racial politics would have been rejected by generations of Malaysians who have gone through the Malaysian education system, but unfortunately the education system has failed us," he said.

However, he disagreed with Wan Saiful's call for decentralisation of the education system, saying that there is still some role for the government to play.

"Obviously, there must be a national education policy. There must be agreed-to objectives that should be pursued.

"However, this must be discussed. The problem with our political leadership is that too many things are classified as sensitive, as official secrets and cannot be brought into public debate because they have this attitude that they know everything and we the public know next to nothing," he said.

Another panellist, National University of Singapore Malay Studies Department head Syed Farid Alatas (left) said if schools fail to instil multiculturalism, "idiots and bigots" would be free to spread lies.

These have led to incidents such as the demonisation of Shia Muslims as deviant despite world leaders in Sunniism (the dominant school of Islam in Malaysia) recognising it as a legitimate school of Islam, and the public outcry over the incident in Johor where a resort operator had allowed a Buddhist group to pray in his surau, he said.

"The rulers and politicians must have the will and the guts to overrule what the very closed-minded are saying about these various issues," he urged.

"For me, the pressure must come from the rakyat, but how can pressure be exerted from the population if they are not educated about what is right and what is wrong?"