I was schooled during the good old days of dual medium schools, my father at that time insisted that I go to an English Medium School in JB so there I was started schooling at Sekolah Temengong Abdul Rahman (STAR1) in 1968. Those days you will find Malays, Chinese, Indians, Sikhs students mixing around easily unlike these days when students are polarised by the Sekolah Kebangsaan and Vernacular and Religious Schools. Teachers be they Chinese, Indians or Malays are a bunch of dedicated masters bent on making all their students to be attentive in class.
Then some smart alec politicians decided to listen to the language extremists who insisted that the English Medium Schools are to be abolished because parents are slowly not sending their kids to vernacular schools preferring instead to send them to English medium schools. When I took my MCE (Malaysia Certificate of Education) in 1978 that will be the 2nd last time that MCE exams were held. 1979 was the last for MCE and after that its SPM until now.
Since the abolishment of the MCEour Education System has seen one mess after another and our children are growing up polarised within their own school vacuum. As a result we are now a nation polarised by race and religion, some of us cannot even string a few sentence in our national language Bahasa Melayu together.
I hope one day a politician and does not matter which political divide they come from will decide that the nation will only have a 1 School for All System, perhaps such as described by Dr. Suraiya in her letter to the NST which I reposted below:
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