Education and national development
Conventional wisdom has it that education plays a crucial role in nation building. This is more distinctly promulgated in the histories of countries that have developed or are deeply engaged in the process of developing after they overcame imperial rule. All the countries in Southeast Asia sought their independence after the Second World War when the concepts and practices of nationhood and nation building were already in vogue in the western world. The immediate post-war years of 1945 and 1948 saw Indonesia, the Philippines and Burma (now Myanmar), along with India, Pakistan and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in South Asia, attaining freedom from colonial supremacy. Between the years 1949–1965, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaya and the Borneo states of Sabah and Sarawak, and Singapore achieved their sovereignty. And Brunei was proclaimed a free state by the British in 1984 after about 13 years of the right of governance for internal affairs. Thailand, of course, was the only country in the region that was never under any form of foreign governance.
Today, all these countries are at different stages of nation building, while striving to attain the next. Singapore has for some time been recognised as a developed country, some even consider it as advanced, because of its strong open economic position in the world. Singapore reigns as the economic superpower in Southeast Asia. Malaysia (a confederation of Malaya, Sabah and Sarawak), Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, and Brunei along with Thailand have also been accounted for their status as developing countries despite the experiences of long lingering internal disturbances politically and ethnically; the rest of the states namely Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos continue to lag within the cornerstones of agrarian and commodity-based economies struggling to put their acts together to arise from the underdeveloped countries pool. These countries provide exemplary cases where education shows up remarkably as a major force with a correlational role in the economic, social and national development of a state (Brock & Symaco, 2011).
A unique feature among most of these Southeast Asian countries was, and is, their multi-ethnic and multicultural population that came about largely because of the inflow of immigrants historically, who in the past had come in as traders and stayed on, who were brought in large numbers by the colonial governments to serve their economic interests, and who left their homeland at their own free will in search of a better life. The immigrant peoples had also brought along their own tradition, culture, language, and religion which in the years forthcoming posed formidable challenges to nation building in the respective host countries. Besides developing the polity industrially, economically, and socially, these countries had to create the ethos and an amiable environment for the various ethnic and cultural groups to live in peace and harmony alongside the others, while at the same time taking care of the predominance of the nation’s indigenous people.
In describing and characterising the role of education in nation building, scholars underscore that it generates a literate and enlightened society, a crucial precondition for the national development process. An educated society will be prudently civil and will listen, learn and reason. If at all there is going to be any social cohesion and unity among the diverse groups in society it was to be placated by a well nurtured and informed mind-set. Moreover, education is a direct contributor to human resource development, which in economic terms has come to be connoted as human capital denoting its criticality and relevance in establishing and managing institutions that support a democratic and meritocratic bureaucracy at the same time providing the multifarious resource needs of economic and industrial activities. Education also underlies the social stratification of a society which inherently falls in place according to individual urges, motivation, drive, capacity and opportunity. For example, it raises and determines the largeness of the middle-class of a country constituting professionals, doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, teachers and professors, technocrats, administrators, and so forth, which the economists say is an extremely important factor in national well-being and growth.
This book, “Policy Discourses in Malaysian Education: A Nation in the Making” emerged out of a project to capture and document the historical surge and strife of a confederation namely, Malaysia, in the course of its developmental crusade, and how education has been deployed and manoeuvred politically, as the two are deeply intertwined especially in developing countries, to harness national aspirations, ideas and goals as well as to regain and recoup from any shortfalls.
In a matter of fifty over years since independence Malaysia had progressed from a largely agricultural and commodity-based nation into an industrialised, technologically advanced, knowledge-based, and export oriented economy. Politically as well, it has evolved its own form of democracy, attaining new levels of maturity and functionality, while maintaining a monarchical system. However, this book by no means aims to theorise or arrive at any fundamentals of the correlation between education and nation building as it does not constitute adequate number of chapters on all the relevant aspects of education policies which contribution would bear a direct influence on the federation’s total development. Nevertheless, it may be pointed out that the materials in the book do span over a reasonable space, time and facets of history of the country and offer opportunity for incidental triangulation and counter verification that readers may draw their own conclusions and assumptions about the nature and narrative of development in the country. The articles assembled present a critical analysis of select policies, of their objectives, implementation, and outcome and, in some cases, expropriated consequences.
The Malaysian experience may resemble those of certain other countries categorically in the region but may not necessarily hold a model to prescribe them. Individually, the manuscripts aim for policy-based discourses and cover several different aspects and perspectives as to how education has been used by those in power as a political protocol in developing the nation. Also, a careful reading of the materials will reveal that the form and state of education in the country may have carved their own courses of growth beyond those deliberately targeted, for the better or worse, along with national development. Additionally, the materials may also help to shed light on whether or not education has directly played a role in the country’s growth, or it has been subjected to political expediency, aspirations and controversial stances thus to undermine otherwise a humanistic evolvement of the country and its populace.
By the standards of academic norms, the manuscripts do convincingly qualify as well researched productions supported by both primary and secondary data to deserve meaningful intellectual appeal. The authors are qualified personnel in their respective disciplines. However, none of the chapters on the policy discourses would make much sense independently to strangers lacking sufficient knowledge of the historical background of Malaysia. This chapter as an introduction to the book would serve to address the issue. It will essentially lay out the critical markers of the country’s historical and educational development along with the progress directed at growth. In fact, the chapter would stand out as a framework to proffer the context and historical connectivity to all of the different educational policy discourses covered in the different chapters. It begins from the time when Malaya, Sabah and Sarawak parted ways with the colonial rulers, and reaches out to the current period.
Malaysia as it emerged
Malaysia became a national and political reality in 1963 as a confederation of three different countries geographically separated by the South China Sea, namely Malaya, Sarawak and Sabah. Singapore was a member of the organisation at the time of formation but opted out two years later because of political and ideological differences. Malaya or the Malay peninsula (also known as peninsular Malaysia) is an extended terrain of mainland Asia while Sarawak and Sabah are located along the northern shores of the Borneo island. The general history is that the three countries had been long time colonies of the British, Malaya for nearly two centuries, and Sarawak and Sabah since the mid-nineteenth century when they sought British intervention for protection and self-preservation. The three countries had their individual historical background and demographic makeup. Thomas (2007) cited that when independence was proclaimed, it was first for Malaya in 1957, the population was estimated at 6.3 million constituting 49.8% Malays, 37.2% Chinese, and 11.3% Indians. The formation of Malaysia automatically raised the population to a new norm of 9.3 million, and altered the demographic structure which, according to the 1964 census, was at 52.5% Malays and other Bumiputras (referring to the natives of Sabah and Sarawak), 36.7% Chinese, 9.6% Indians, and 2.2% Others. The departure of Singapore from the federation, of course, did not make a major difference in the overall population mix but for the Chinese. The new coalition of states had also increased the demographic multiplicity and multiplexity with the inclusion of the indigenous peoples of the two Borneo states with the already multiracial and multi-ethnic population of Malaya.
Economically, the federation had depended largely on agriculture and primary commodities such as rubber, rice and tin. In Malaya, the Malays lived largely in rural areas and relied on farming and fishing for their livelihood, while the Indians concentrated in the estate areas adjoining rubber plantations and provided the necessary labour, and the Chinese formed the majority of the urban population and occupied themselves with tin mining and commercial activities. The people of Sarawak and Sabah were known also to have been involved in agriculture and fishing; however they were not scaled at a comparative level with Peninsular Malaysia. Obviously, there was huge disparity in household income among the ethnic groups, which was coupled with a national poverty rate of 49.3% around the time Malaysia was formed. Data for Peninsular Malaysia revealed the Chinese, then, as the richer of the lot at a poverty incidence of 26%, followed by the Indians and Malays at 39% and 65% respectively (Yusoff, Abu Hasan & Abdul Jalil, 2000). This was legitimately reflected in the corporate ownership of the different groups: Chinese at 27.2%; Malays and Bumiputras with 2.4%; Indians with only 1.1%; and, foreigners holding 63.4% (Gomez & Jomo, 1997). However, related data on the economic status of the people could not be obtained for Sarawak and Sabah. Also noteworthy was the Gross National Product (GNP) which at the time of Malaysia formation was at USD 6362 million (Hirschman, 1974). And again, no statement could be produced about the contribution of Sarawak and Sabah to the Malaysian GNP at the time.
Educationally, independent Malaysia was still lingering with the colonial mould, which was designed to serve British political and economic interests rather than promote scholastic and social advancement of the locals. It was more in the form of public offering, often organised and sponsored by the various communities to safeguard their culture, language and tradition, than for institution building let alone national development. It was segregated and disjointed along linguistic-ethnic streams of English, Malay, Chinese and Tamil in the case of Malaya, and was immensely impoverished in terms of resources. Malakolunthu and Rengasamy (2006, p. 121) wrote about the Malayan education at the time of independence in 1957, in Globalization, Modernization and Education in Muslim Countries:
By and large, the educational policy of the British in Malaya had a colonial orientation, exploitative, limited and constricted. There was no noble ideology or greater aspirations or concern for the country, its national development and integration of the ethnically divided population, all of which could have been attained through education. However, the British colonial government opened a number of English medium schools for creating a local educated workforce to fill the support staff positions in the administration. Some local educated individuals seeking to profiteer from the prevalent situation as well as missionary societies also ventured into the provision of Western education especially for the mixed urban population. A key factor in all these schools was that education was not free hence could not reach out to the masses, especially those in the rural areas. Moreover, the thought of having to pay for education, which was beyond the means of many families, coupled with the desire to promote and retain the identity of home culture led the Chinese and Tamil communities to set up their own vernacular schools to cater for the educational needs of their children. For the Malay children, the colonial government set up Malay vernacular schools that provided free education.
During the pre-independent days secondary education was attributed with economic value: one could proceed to tertiary education that would lead to covetous positions in the government or be offered a better job placement. This was provided only by the British government and missionary schools. However, the Chinese, who were pro-active in their educational pursuits, set up their own independent Chinese secondary schools. The Malays and Tamils were deprived of secondary education because their vernacular schools were limited to primary education. Structurally, the Malays were also allowed the opportunity of secondary education after completion of four years of vernacular education and in attendance of transition classes in English. Technically, during the pre-independent days, English was the main medium of instruction.
A word of caution may be necessary to do academic justice to the narrative in this section especially with regard to facts in the areas of economy and education. More often than not, the historical data are more representative of Malaya than Sabah and Sarawak as such data were scanty or inaccessible for the latter two states. They seemed to have evaded academic scrutiny over the years. But, it may not mean that the two states were devoid of any economic, educational and other institutional development activities prior to their independence. The British government along with the local leadership in the Borneo states, after the Second World War that led to the end of Japanese occupation in the Southeast Asian region, and which left the two states war torn and in shambles, had indeed engaged in rebuilding them with basic infrastructure, amenities, educational system and medical facilities (Lee, 2011).
The context of independence
History has it that the British precluded offering independence to Malaya and, subsequently, the formation of Malaysia, without the assurance of a precondition for unity and harmony among the various ethnic groups (Thomas, 2007). Although the peoples of the land (Malaya) had long lived in a segregated environment culturally and institutionally each taking care of their own communal interests because of the British “divide and rule” policy for unscrupulous economic gains (Drakakis-Smith, 1992), the three major races including all the inherent ethnic groups had to be brought together to foster a common front for independence. The founding fathers who were leaders of the various racial groups thus convened an alliance which in due course emerged with a memorandum called the “Social Contract” which was duly enshrined in the Federal Constitution. Although the drafting of the Social Contract commenced prior to the independence of Malaya, the basic principles from it were adopted for a set of 20 and 18 points of common allegiance for Sabah and Sarawak respectively as the “Malaysia Agreement” to envisage the governance of Malaysia as a federation. Thomas (2007) reported on the nature and essence of the Social Contract in a paper presented at the 14th Malaysian Law Conference in 2007. Accordingly, the obligatory position of the non-Malays in exchange for full citizenship with a right to use their own language and practice their own religion was to accede to the special privileges of the Malays aimed at elevating their economic standing. The paper also highlighted as a crucial element of the memorandum that the multiracial composition of the Malayan population was to be recognized and encouraged, and no form of pressure asserted to integrate it through assimilation.
The readers may also take note that the Malaysia Agreement of the 20/18 points that was drawn between Sabah (previously known as North Borneo), Sarawak and Malaya was signed on the 9th of July 1963 with the British government for the formation of the new federal state before it was officially declared to the world. There may be a brief background on the history of the Malaysia Agreement; however, of relevance to this chapter is the fact that the 20 points for Sabah constituted brief commentaries or descriptions under separate sub-headings, which supposedly was to prescribe the safeguarding of the state’s security and autonomy. For the 18 points of Sarawak, apparently, the same 20 points of Sabah but short of the last two were incorporated in the Malaysia Agreement. It seemed that in the case of Sarawak only the sub-headings of the Sabah 20 points were mentioned in the agreement, and the related texts or explanatory notes were not available to-date. Substantially, apart from the administration of the Federation and the States with regard to the new alliance, the Malaysia Agreement raised consensus on key areas such as religion, language, constitution and constitutional safeguards, immigration and citizenship, special position of the indigenous people, and education.
Essentially, the Social Contract in the case of Malaya and the Malaysia Agreement for Sabah and Sarawak with Malaya underscore the inherent diversity and the right of claim for self-identity and self-preservation as factors of allegiance by the three national entities. The key elements of these bonding documents, which were later enshrined in the Federal Constitution, laid the foundation for a multi-cultural model of governance that was not to be assimilative but accommodative. They were also to be cherished dearly by all future generations to determine the character of nation building for Malaysia.
