Dec 14 – Friday morning on my way to work I heard a discussion on the radio about whether parents should be friends to their children. There were of course different opinions expressed; everything from how parents should be stricter to children getting more freedom.
The world is no longer what it was during the time my generation was growing up. Children today are influenced by their peers, the TV, movies and most recently the Internet.
The children of the present era enjoy greater freedom than what was given to my generation. They want to exercise greater freedom in their choice of friends as well as material things.
Any unreasonable restriction of choice and pressure would be resisted.
If a child grows up in such an environment and becomes an adult, would this adult be willing to subject himself to too much restriction?The answer is no. The people of today know their rights better than at any other time in the history of mankind. They want to have a choice. They want to be able to exercise their right to choose.
They want to have the right to choose their spouses; the right to choose their houses; the right to vote for their representatives; the right to use either the toll road or other alternatives; the right to choose the schools for their children.
Society is moving rapidly from a hierarchy-based one to one that is being flattened, thanks to the rapid expansion of the middle-class - as well as the Internet revolution that is changing the perspective of this middle-class - all over the world.
With this expansion comes a realization that they are the masters of their own destiny. They would not want too much restriction.
Any restriction or compulsion will naturally meet with resistance.
Recently, the issue of the existence of vernacular schools has become a hot topic of discussion again after Mukhriz Mahathir raised it.
Even Professor Khoo Kay Kim expressed support for a single school system as reported in The Sun.
I disagree with both of them and issued a statement on this.
Firstly, I do not think that racial unity can be achieved by having all parents sending their children to national schools.
At the present moment, about 90 per cent of the Chinese send their children to vernacular Chinese primary schools. The rest 10per cent sends their children to national schools.
Do this 10per cent of Chinese Malaysian children mix well with their classmates from another ethnic group?
The answer, sadly, is no. Helen Ang, a Malaysiakini columnist, wrote in a well-argued piece " Di mana bumi ku pijak" this :
"He (Mukhriz) should visit the national schools during recess and see how pupils sit in their own racial groups while eating in the canteen. He should drop by after school hours and see the kids play within their own racial groups when waiting for the bus or to be fetched home. He should meet with the PTAs or read in the news, or in blogs how teachers in national schools bully and victimise Indian children.
Racism and religious supremacy is becoming endemic in national schools. Therefore putting all the kids under one roof will not solve what's in essence a problem of communal politics."
What she wrote is a common phenomenon in national schools. Polarisation will exist even if the government converts all schools into a single system.
The same phenomenon exists in national secondary schools as well as tertiary institutions. The same phenomenon exists in national service camps, too.
Secondly, as I have mentioned above, people today want to have freedom of choice. They are not like my generation.
Many of the decision making leaders of the government are from my generation and these leaders must understand that people now want to have a choice - and education is a field where they want to have the freedom to choose for their children.
Looking at history, vernacular schools actually faced the problem of being phased out in the Sixties, not because of any forced closure, but because more and more parents at that time were sending their children to English medium schools, where job prospects and upward mobility were seen to be better.
Vernacular schools got its life back again thanks to the conversion of all English medium schools to Malay national schools in the late 60s.
Parents, after the conversion, began sending their children to vernacular schools as they shunned national schools, no thanks to the perception that the conversion of English schools was seen as a forced integration of the school system.
Anything forced upon people would naturally meet with resistance.
The rest is, of course, history. Vernacular Chinese schools, after being given a second life, lifted their quality and produced better quality students, so much so that about 60,000 of their students now are from other races, including Malays and Indians.
The lesson here is integration must be allowed to evolve naturally and slowly. People must be willing to mix, and cannot be forced to mix. People must be given the freedom to choose; any force or compulsion will meet with the opposite result.
So, let us not hurry the process of integration of schools. In fact, choice begets competition and competition begets excellence.
Excellence and upward mobility will ultimately be what attracts a parent to make the choice of which school or stream to send their children.
In fact, we should allow English schools to make a comeback and let there be more choices for parents.
The existence of different streams has nothing to do with polarisation of race, which arises from race politics practised by too many politicians in Malaysia.
Until and unless we do away with the race issue, polarisation will always exist no matter how much compulsion is used to force integration.
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