Beyond UEC, a problem of the best education money can buy

We can work out a good national system with the best parts of Chinese schools and national schools, but private education threatens to divide us through class and wealth.

It looks like the issue of the recognition of the Unified Examination Certificate Chinese school syllabus is on again.

Of course, it’s just the usual politics, which, in Malaysia, is always tinged, if not actually soaked, with race.

Rational debate on this matter is almost impossible. The occurrence of the debates seem to depend on who’s winning or losing politically at the moment. The recent elections in Sabah certainly has something to do with the current episode.

The main argument we often hear against recognising the UEC is that it perpetuates, perhaps even rewards, the existence of Chinese schools and hampers efforts to unite the diverse Malaysian society.

There’s a point there. Early Malaysian leaders believed education was the strongest glue holding our potentially-explosive multi-cultural society together. And they were right.

Up to then, many early Chinese immigrants saw the land of what is now Malaysia as a place to be settled, a land where you can homestead and reproduce your culture and beliefs in freedom, without much regards to the indigenous

The British system of divide and rule ensured this happened, controlling the populace by keeping them apart, a policy that helped to extract the maximum wealth possible from the land.

But the price paid is an almost virtual balkanisation of the country based on mostly separate existences of the newcomers – principally those from China and India – among the indigenous and native populations in the peninsula and on the Borneo side.

Colonial thinking

In the colonial days, Malay education was basically just teaching kids enough of the 3Rs so they could grow up to be clerks. I went to my kampung’s Malay primary school where if it wasn’t for a stroke of good fortune I’d probably would’ve ended up as a clerk myself.

I, and millions others back then, were not part of the “brilliant” education system that we supposedly had back in those days. Many in the rural backwaters didn’t even get to enjoy any education of any sort whatsoever.

Malaysia’s early leaders recognised the urgent need to lift many of our rural citizens, mostly Malays, out of poverty through education. My good fortune sent me to a much better secondary school that existed precisely because of this belief.

I studied in English, back when all the best resources and talents were devoted to English schooling. By the late 1970s, though, Malay was the only language option offered to government schools.

The debate of English versus Malay medium in school is a whole can of worms by itself. But I do agree having a common curriculum, including a main language of school instruction, is the right way forward.

Had we gone with English back then would’ve meant ignoring the aspirations of much of the population and the very real obstacles of getting many of them any kind of education at all regardless of the language of instruction.

Malay nationalism and dominance

Soon enough, politics entered the picture, and later race and religion coloured the politics so much you can’t even remember what colour it started with.

There weren’t many efforts in good faith by Malay politicians to create an all-encompassing school system that would bring the people together. They saw education as an opportunity to control and dominate others. Their debate was, and continues, to be cloaked in nationalism and patriotism, which are just a cover for political power and dominance.

In spite of enormous investment, national schools are beset by many issues, not least of which is the quality gulf between the best, often urban, schools versus the rest. There also remains the issue of quality between the national schools versus the Chinese schools and the burgeoning private and international schools.

On UEC recognition, Sarawak for reasons both practical and political had gone ahead and recognised the curriculum. Meanwhile, the rest of the country is stuck with a lumbering national education system that hasn’t achieved the original intention of bringing Malaysians together.

At the same time, more Malay parents are sending their kids to Chinese schools. I doubt many Malay nationalists like this trend – and I know some of the people running the Chinese school systems aren’t too happy about this “invasion” of their precious system either.

For the ever increasing number of Malays sending their children to Chinese schools, their motivations vary from perception of a more rigorous education system to the need to be able to speak Mandarin Chinese in a world increasingly dominated by the People’s Republic of China.

Kampung at heart

I’m a product of the national school system by necessity. My children, however, all went to the local national schools, a choice I made. I had my own reasons – I balanced the perception of having a better “brain” by sending them to private schools versus the need for them to keep their kampung “heart” –as I see myself to be.

They all did OK. Some jumped into employment the moment they could, while others chose to pursue further studies.

The local national schools they attended didn’t really harm their intellectual development – but didn’t help it much, either.

It was helpful that I happen to believe education is more than just sending children to school. There are many other things parents can do outside of schools that can open their hearts and minds, a fact that many seem to miss.

Drawbacks of Chinese schools

The UEC curriculum has been proven to be good at one aspect of education – making the students resilient and employable. The long history of Confucian ethics that undergirds the Chinese system certainly helped in achieving this.

But it’s not perfect – many of the old-school Chinese education styles such as rote learning, harsh discipline and excessive school work and homework, while good for producing accountants or engineers in the past, are less effective today.

At the risk of being so fair and balanced in understanding both sides such that I cannot come to a conclusion, let me tell you what I think is reasonable.

We need more students with good STEM skills to support the country’s vision as well as the realities of today’s world. The Chinese schools are better at this, and we must recognise this.

Looking to the future

The national education policymakers must also accept we’re a multicultural and diverse country, and that these are actually our strengths and not our weaknesses. The current national schools don’t seem to reflect this, especially with the over-emphasis of making them more Malay- and Islam-centric.

But everybody must also accept having competing, diverging curricula is not helping to foster national unity. In most national schools non-Malays are becoming a rarity, driven by the feeling they’re not welcomed to the schools. This is not right.

The UEC curriculum must be tweaked such that it tracks closer to the national curriculum, especially on the use of Malay as its medium of instruction. With agreement to these tweaks it should be recognised, just as Sarawak has accepted it.

This pathway however must have an end date.

After a suitable period – perhaps 20 years – there must not be any other curriculum except the national one. By that time the national curriculum must also have been improved to incorporate the best of the Chinese education system while becoming less and less a vehicle for Malay nationalism and religious chauvinism.

What the elites do

It’s doable. It takes some give and take, but that is what politics is all about. We can’t continue arguing about this endlessly. The politicians are happy to do it, but the rest of us in the real world understand this is counter-productive.

I’m personally more worried by the rise of private and international schools, partly as an outcome of this unresolved issue of national versus Chinese curriculum, but more importantly because the education issue seems nowadays to be divided by wealth.

Many of our elites – meaning the rich, and this includes the rich and powerful Malays too – are bypassing national schools altogether. It’s creating a division based on class and wealth that I think will hurt and damage the country more down the road than the race issue will.

I think this issue demands more attention from the policymakers, as they are likely to create vast wealth inequalities that will pit Malaysians against each other. So let’s be done with the UEC issue and focus on this instead. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.