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Cabinet should hold a special meeting before end of the year to give proper approval and authorization for second Mahathir education review committee Media Statement by Lim Kit Siang (Petaling Jaya, Friday): The Cabinet should hold a special meeting before the end of the year to give proper approval and authorization for the establishment of the second Mahathir education review committee or the Cabinet Ministers will be guilty of gross irresponsibility in allowing 2002 to end with an important unfinished business. It will be most ridiculous, outrageous and a major blot on the Ministers if the Cabinet cannot give official approval for the setting-up of the second Mahathir education review committee for the whole month of December after the UMNO Supreme Council had made a decision on the issue on November 29 - as it would reflect either shocking incompetence or utter irrelevance of the Cabinet, neither of which is a credit to the Ministers who are bound by the principle of collective Ministerial responsibility. UMNO Vice President and Defence Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak was very frank yesterday in his speech at the University of Malaya on "Malaysian Politics in the 21st century" when he admitted the failure of the national education system to unite students of all races. (Sin Chew daily) Najib said that the education system failed to create national unity or at most had a most superficial effect, and that the government must construct a new framework to promote the integration of the students of diverse races. Najib's admission of the failure of the national education system to create national unity out of the diverse races in the country deserves two comments: Firstly, the failure of the national education system is also a failure of all the previous Education Ministers particularly of the past three decades, three of whom occupy the three highest political positions in government today - namely the outgoing Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, the Prime Minister-in-waiting, Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and the second Prime Minister-in-waiting, Najib himself! Secondly, Najib's statement contradicts what Mahathir said in his recent visit to India where in answer to a question by an Indian journalist on his legacy, Mahathir said he regarded forging closer race relations in Malaysia's plural society as his most important achievement in his 21 years as Prime Minister. Be that as it may, what is pertinent is that one of the two objectives of the second Mahathir education review committee is to foster national unity by ensuring that national schools are the popular choice of all Malaysians - the other objective being to improve the quality of education. However, the question that immediately begs answer is how the second Mahathir education review committee (as Mahathir had chaired a Cabinet education review committee which took five years to complete its report and recommendations before he became Prime Minister in 1981) can rectify the historic failure of the national education system to foster national integration and become a true and genuine instrument of national unity in plural Malaysia when it is a purely UMNO committee, not involving all sectors of Malaysian society and fully representative of all political opinions (both government and opposition) and educational views covering the entire spectrum of the multi-racial, multi-lingual, multi-cultural and multi-religious population? From the pathetic statements of MCA and Gerakan leaders on the issue, it is clear that the other Barisan Nasional component parties have all been excluded from the decision-making process leading to the second Mahathir education review committee. How can the second Mahathir education review committee produce the blueprint to forge national unity out of the diverse races in the country when it is more flawed and defective than all previous education review committees by being not only mono-racial but mono-party? Another critical flaw of the second Mahathir education review committee is to blame the different streams of national, Chinese and Tamil primary schools for being the cause of the greater polarization among the races. A report in the latest issue of Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) titled "A Plan to End Extremism" said: "The disappearance of Chinese from national schools has created a cleaving of the races that begins in primary school. National schools have now become overwhelmingly Malay. (Of Malaysia's population, 60% are Malay, 32% Chinese, 7% Indians and 1% others." As "an indication of the growing ethnic divide", the FEER report said: "In 1964, 98% of ethnic Chinese children went to Malaysia's national schools; today the number is 5%, the remainder opting for Chinese or private education. The shift was due in part to a perceived decline in the quality of national education, and in part to the switch to the Malay language as a medium of instruction, not English." Both the 1964 and current data cannot be right, and overlook the fact that in the five years of national secondary education, the overwhelming majority of Malaysian students, regardless of race or religion, undergo the same schooling under the same roof in the national secondary education system. Although at the primary school level, some 90 per cent of Chinese pupils and 80 per cent of Indian pupils enrol in their mother-tongue primary schools (some 10 per cent of the Chinese primary school enrolment are Malays, Indians and other non-Chinese), they all use the same common national syllabus set by the Education Ministry. However, for the five-year secondary education, the overwhelming majority of Malaysian students, regardless of race, undergo the same schooling in the national secondary schools and the FEER scenario of only 5% of Chinese in the national secondary schools is simply incorrect and untrue. This is because there are no Tamil secondary schools and although there are 60 Chinese Independent Secondary School, they only enrol some 10 per cent of the Std. VI pupils - which means that some 90 per cent of the Std. VI Chinese primary school students continue their studies in the national secondary schools. The more pertinent question to be asked is why after some 10 to 11 years of schooling under the same roof, comprising five years of secondary education, two-years pre-university and three or four years of university education, the educational and socialization processes have failed to foster greater national integration among the new generation of Malaysians of diverse races? If the second Mahathir education review committee is to result in a national education system which will overcome these historic failures and be a genuine instrument of national integration of the diverse races in the country, then it must itself be a model of national integration whether in composition, terms of reference or modus operandi - and not just be a committee representing the Barisan Nasional or even worse, just UMNO. If the second Mahathir education review committee is not going to start on a right and proper footing by being fully representative of all political and educational views and opinions and representing the full spectrum of the Malaysian society, then it will only sell itself short - as it would be regarded merely as a narrow and sectional endeavour to advance UMNO political interests and not a truly national effort to reform education to be a genuine instrument of national integration and nation-building. (20/12/2002) * Lim Kit Siang, DAP National Chairman