This book provides a comprehensive analysis of key educational issues in multiethnic Malaysia. It examines the country's transitional bilingual education model that aims to maintain minority languages while promoting the majority language. However, this model has faced criticisms such as weakening minority language competence and impairing ethnic minorities' learning. The book also analyzes how ethnic segregation in education has worsened with racial policies and Islamization, as well as debates over using English and mother tongues as mediums of instruction. It makes an important contribution to understanding the politics and complexities of language and education in multiethnic societies.
This book provides a comprehensive analysis of key educational issues in multiethnic Malaysia. It examines the country's transitional bilingual education model that aims to maintain minority languages while promoting the majority language. However, this model has faced criticisms such as weakening minority language competence and impairing ethnic minorities' learning. The book also analyzes how ethnic segregation in education has worsened with racial policies and Islamization, as well as debates over using English and mother tongues as mediums of instruction. It makes an important contribution to understanding the politics and complexities of language and education in multiethnic societies.
This book provides a comprehensive analysis of key educational issues in multiethnic Malaysia. It examines the country's transitional bilingual education model that aims to maintain minority languages while promoting the majority language. However, this model has faced criticisms such as weakening minority language competence and impairing ethnic minorities' learning. The book also analyzes how ethnic segregation in education has worsened with racial policies and Islamization, as well as debates over using English and mother tongues as mediums of instruction. It makes an important contribution to understanding the politics and complexities of language and education in multiethnic societies.
This book provides a comprehensive analysis of key educational issues in multiethnic Malaysia. It examines the country's transitional bilingual education model that aims to maintain minority languages while promoting the majority language. However, this model has faced criticisms such as weakening minority language competence and impairing ethnic minorities' learning. The book also analyzes how ethnic segregation in education has worsened with racial policies and Islamization, as well as debates over using English and mother tongues as mediums of instruction. It makes an important contribution to understanding the politics and complexities of language and education in multiethnic societies.
Southern University College Academic Journal, Volume 2, August 2014
2 2014 8
Tan Yap Sua and R. Santhiram, Educational Issues in Multiethnic
Malaysia. Petaling Jaya, Selangor: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, 2014. 230 pp. This work is an excellent sequel to their earlier book The Education of Ethnic Minorities: the Case of the Malaysian Chinese (2010). In their two books, Tan and Santhiram have provided a rigorous, comprehensive analysis of some of the key debated and contested educational issues in Malaysia. While the earlier book focuses on the education of an ethnic minority, the Malaysian Chinese, the present volume extends that analysis to covering educational issues in the national Malaysian context, specifically Peninsular Malaysia. The books seven chapters are revised versions of papers presented at various international conferences, some already published as journal articles, and are linked thematically. Accordingly, the chapters are organized in the book under three thematic parts, namely the education of ethnic minorities, education and national integration, and educational language policy. In Malaysia, minority language rights have been passionately contested even before the country achieved political independence in 1957. Chapter 1 briefly discusses the colonial history and politics that shaped the growth of the transitional bilingual model in Malaysia. In Malaysia, there are also two competing language claims: on the one side the Chinese and Indian minorities insisted on the maintenance of their languages, and on the other the ethnic majority, the Malays, demanded that their language be made the national language and the common language to facilitate national integration. Inter-ethnic bargaining led the ethnic majority and minorities to compromise on a transitional bilingual model in Malaysia where minority languages are maintained within the context of acquiring and switching to the majority language. Chinese and Indian mother-tongue medium of instruction are maintained at primary school level, with Malay taught as a course subject, but from secondary school level onwards Malay became the medium of instruction, with Chinese and Tamil taught as course subjects through the Pupils Own Language (POL) policy in secondary schools.
196
Book Reviews
The Malaysian transitional bilingual model enables ethnic minorities to
maintain their languages and assists them to acquire the majority language, but there are critical flaws and consequences. Three critical flaws identified are; (i) ethnic minorities competence level in their mother tongue is sorely weakened because of the way POL is implemented, (ii) the devaluation of Chinese and Tamil in secondary schools and students lack of understanding the instrumental value of learning their mother tongues, and (iii) problems in switching to the national language because of the abrupt change in the medium of instruction. The authors argue that mother tongue schools put too much emphasis on maintaining minority languages at the expense of acquiring the national language. As a result the onus in helping Chinese and Indian students in switching to Malay medium fell unduly upon the Remove Class system, which, for a number of reasons, the government has not execute effectively. Partly because of their weak command of Malay (Bahasa Malaysia), ethnic minorities learning in secondary schools is impaired which contributed, unsurprising, to significant number of Chinese and Indian students dropping out of school. Tan and Santhiram argue that the problems facing the teaching of minority languages in Malaysia are largely due to the prevailing Malay perception that a common language is the basis of integrating the diverse population and that minority language schools are politically divisive rather than as an asset to the nation. An educational hierarchy has materialised where minority language schools are circumscribed by a unitary education school that valorises the national language as the identity marker and the common language to facilitate national integration. Minority language schools thus received less public funding than the national primary schools. Indeed, because of the meagre public funding received, Chinese and Indian schools became more dependent on financial donations from their respective ethnic communities. Indian schools are usually financially the worse off precisely because most of their support had come from the lower income segments of the Indian community. Ethnic segregation in the Malaysian educational system has worsened especially since the implementation of the ethnic preferential policies in the early 1970s. Ethnic segregation occurs at the primary school level with the
197
Southern University College Academic Journal, Volume 2, August 2014
2 2014 8
majority of Malays enrolled in national schools, Chinese in Chinese schools
and Indians in Tamil schools, and at the secondary level with a large percentage of the Chinese enrolled in National-Type Chinese Secondary Schools and Independent Chinese Secondary Schools and the establishment of exclusively Malay-Muslim MARA, residential and religious schools. Since 1990s, with the privatization of higher education ethnic segregation has also permeated this level where a huge majority of students enrolled in private higher education are Chinese while public higher education has become more and more exclusively Malay. Indeed, enrolments in some higher education institutions such as MARA University of Technology (UITM), which has around 100,000 students, and Islamic higher education institutions are largely Malay Muslims. Arguably, the two most important push factors that have accentuated ethnic segregation in the Malaysian educational system are the racial preferential policies and the increasing Islamization of the public education sector. Aware of the increasing ethnic segregation of education and its deleterious effects on ethnic relations, attempts were made by the government to facilitate ethnic integration especially at primary school level, but, unfortunately, all attempts have thus failed. The authors argue that although ethnic interaction in education is not a panacea for better ethnic integration, it is, nevertheless, an important contributory factor and the state must look at more into ways to facilitate this. Chapter 6 examines the failed government policy to use English as the medium of instruction to teach science and mathematics. This policy was hastily implemented in stages from 2003 and then abruptly terminated in 2012. The rationale for the implementation of teaching mathematics and science in English was twofold, namely to improve students proficiency in English and the mastering of such would enable access to knowledge in mathematics and science. Politically, this policy was strongly objected to by Malay nationalists who felt it would undermine the status of Malay as the national language and by non-Malays, especially Chinese educationists, as it would diminish, they feared, the status of Chinese as a medium of instruction and the Chinese character of Chinese schools.
198
Book Reviews
For the authors, the implementation of the English policy failed to
address two major issues. Firstly, since English is the second language for most Malaysians as the medium of instruction at the primary level, its implementation went against established theory of education which asserts that mother tongue is the most suitable medium of instruction to begin primary education. A second issue was the lack of proficiency in English among teachers and students which considerably hindered the effective implementation of the policy. Tan and Santhiram noted that the Chinese schools bilingual model adopted to facilitate the use of English as a medium of instruction to teach mathematics and science was more in tandem with theories of learning compared to the overly simplistic maximum exposure model adopted by national primary schools. Nevertheless, the English for mathematics and science policy was terminated not because of its weak theoretical underpinnings but for political reasons. Since the 1990s, globalization and the spread of English have impacted the Malaysian education system. The economic and technological opportunities afforded by English proficiency in globalization convinced the Malaysian government to allow for the increasing use of English in its higher education system especially in private higher education. While the government was receptive of the economic and technological advantages which proficiency in English would bring about, it was also concerned with students succumbing to linguistic imperialism and hegemony and its Western culture and values. Malay nationalists in particular were concerned that it might devalue Malay language and consequently its role in facilitating national integration. Eventually, the authors argue, the Malaysian state adopted a pragmatic approach of glocalization which involved strengthening both the local and global languages. It was hoped that the glocalization strategy would produce a healthy balance of bilinguals and multilinguals in society so as to cope with both localising and globalising forces. This book is certainly an important contribution to the study of education in Malaysia and in multiethnic societies in general. The wide ranging educational issues covered with rigor and depth by the authors demonstrate the complexities of the politics and development of language and
199
Southern University College Academic Journal, Volume 2, August 2014
2 2014 8
education in multiethnic societies in nation building and in an increasingly
globalized world. Students and scholars of Malaysian studies, and policy makers, should find this book most handy.
Lee Hock Guan
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore hockguan@iseas.edu.sg