Malaysia’s Education System: Insurgency’s Influence
The liberal-minded Tunku Abdul Rahman’s policies of social engineering
and nation-building allowed both an integrated and parallel two-tiered system
of education to emerge. This dualism seemed to satisfy the various ethnic
communities in the country up to the present. The integrated system
comprises a national education system in Malay (the national language) while
the parallel system allows government-aided Chinese vernacular primary and
secondary Chinese schools and Tamil vernacular primary schools to exist, as
well as non-aided but privately-funded Chinese secondary schools. Both
systems, however, follow a national curriculum. These policies were arrived
at after a compromise among the communal parties within the ruling Alliance
and after much debate, and to overcome dissatisfaction among Chinese
educational groups. It was clear to the governing parties that if a compromise
was not reached, Chinese dissatisfaction over Chinese education and Chinese
language could be exploited by the communist insurgency to stir up trouble
for its own interests.
Communist subversion in Chinese schools had appeared intermittently
in the 1950s when Chinese students demonstrated spectacular acts of
violence, but the educational issue did not take on the dimensions of a major
political problem, as it did in Singapore, largely because the MCA and
Chinese educational groups had dominated the national debate on Chinese
education and involved themselves in negotiations with the moderate
government leaders of the UMNO under Tunku Abdul Rahman’s
leadership. However, in terms of social engineering and national integration,
the introduction of a national educational system in which Malay, thenational language, was widely used to teach a common curriculum did
attempt to foster national unity and a national identity for all students in
schools. Although the CPM in the 1960s had adopted a new policy to treat all
races as equal and to demand the languages of all races be made official
languages,28 the continuing public acceptance of Malaysia’s language policy
and national educational policy increasingly sidelined the CPM’s new
language and culture policy.