“Are vernacular schools less nationalistic?”

[superadmin]

VERNACULAR schools in the country, such as Mandarin and Tamil schools, are part and parcel of the educational system. This was something inherited from the colonial and immediate post-colonial periods.

The recent constitutional challenge to the existence of the vernacular schools fizzled out. The court decided that the vernacular schools are as constitutional as the national schools.

However, this judicial decision has not persuaded the detractors from saying that non-Malays who send their children to vernacular schools are not nationalistic enough.

A former prime minister went to the extreme extent of calling the non-Malays “foreigners”. It is argued that the non-Malays, by sending their children to vernacular schools, want to maintain and perpetuate their own ethnic and provincial identities.

Not all non-Malays send their children to vernacular schools, the majority maybe. There is a higher percentage of Chinese sending their children to Mandarin schools than Indians.

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