A lot of people, especially the younger generation, might not understand why the older generation regularly bicker about the existence of vernacular schools in Malaysia, so let me unpack it for you.
As we know, understanding a problem is half of solving it.
The first thing you need to know about the vernacular school issue is that the vernacular school issue itself is just a symptom of the problem. The root of the problem actually lies in the issue of “identity”.
Your “identity” is what allows others to see themselves in you and what allows you to see yourself in others.
As a rule of a thumb, parents and children tend to have the strongest level of identity. It is because parents and children share such a strong identity, that parents are able to spend a considerable part of their resources, effort, energy and attention on their children, without feeling that they are spending it on something outside of themselves.
The reason why your parents never ask you to pay back the money they spent on you is because they see you as an extension of themselves. Just like how you won’t ask yourself to pay back the money that you spent on yourself, parents also generally don’t ask their children to pay back the money that they spent on their children.
As a rule, the more you identify without someone, the more you can trust them and feel comfortable around them. That is theory anyway.
In reality, the world does not lack examples of “betrayals”, or cases where someone who you identified with and trusted as you would yourself, “betrayed” you or treated you in a way that broke your trust. But as a rule of a thumb, we tend to trust someone that we identify with more than we do someone that we don’t identify with.
A big part of the reason why many of us prefer going to a car mechanic or buying vegetables from a person that is of the same race as us is that subconsciously, we assume that the mechanic and the vegetable seller that is of the same race as us, will see themselves in us, and thus charge us as they would charge themselves for their goods and services.
The second thing we need to know is that “identity” is essentially composed of irrational factors. You never identify with a person for rational reasons. You only identify with a person under irrational terms.
If you see two cows in front of you , or if you feel that a 6kg bag is heavier than a 2 kg bag, or if you think that New York is further away than Singapore, and so does another person, you are agreeing with them on a rational basis. These rational agreements will not really be a basis of identity between you and that person.
However, if you feel that the Tamil language is the sweetest language in the world, or that Rajendra Chola is the greatest king in all of history, or that your god is better than all the other gods in the world, or that your race is the race that taught the entire world how to plant rice, or that your country is the best country in the world, and somebody else also believes in it as you do, then these irrational agreements that you have with them will be a basis of identity between you and that person.
As a rule, the more the number of irrational things that two people agree upon, the more will they be able to identify with each other.
Now that you understand these two things, let us come back to the issue of vernacular schools.
Parents and children generally want to identify with each other. In order to identify with each other, parents will desire indoctrinating their children with the same sort of irrationality that they were indoctrinated with. Vernacular schools exist because they provide parents from minority races with the means of indoctrinating their children with the same irrationality that they were indoctrinated with, so that their children and them will be able to identify with each other more intimately.
In terms of rationality, vernacular schools, national schools and private schools are almost 100 percent similar. Whatever mathematics and science that you can learn in national schools, you can also learn it in private and vernacular schools.
The main difference between the national, private and vernacular schools lies in their irrational component. Different streams of schools will indoctrinate a child to identify with a different group of people. Vernacular schools will indoctrinate a child to identify with a particular racial group, national school will indoctrinate them to identity with the nation and the citizen of the nation ( although this is not universally agreed upon) while international schools indoctrinate them to identify with the global community.
In a Tamil school, for example, you will likely be indoctrinated with the idea that Tamil is the most beautiful and oldest language that exists in the world. In national and private schools, however, even if you are taught Tamil, you will not be taught that it is the most beautiful or oldest language in the world.
If your parents and members of your race believe that Tamil is the most beautiful language in the world, while you just believe that Tamil is just another language, amongst the many languages in the world, even if all of you can speak in Tamil, you might not identify with your parents and your people as intimately as how a parent, child and race of a people that believe that Tamil is the most beautiful language in the world will identify with each other.
In a more homogenous country like Japan or Korea, a parents desire to identify with their children will not cause their children to be alienated from their peer group. If you were Japanese, you believing in whatever irrationality that forms the basis of identity amongst Japanese, will allow you to form an identity connection not only with your parents, but also with your peers, because both your parents and your peers likely believe in the same irrational ideas and concepts.
In a multiracial country like Malaysia, however, your parents' desire to identify with you will cause you to be alienated from your peer group, because your parents and peers likely do not believe in the same irrational ideas and concepts.
The irrational concepts and ideas that you believe in, which causes you to believe that the Tamil language as the most poetic language in the world, and a girl to be incomplete unless she has a pottu on, or make you feel more satisfied watching a Rajnikanth movie than an Andy Lau movie, might be the same irrational concepts and ideas that your parents believe in, but they are unfortunately not the same irrational ideas and concepts that your Malay and Chinese peers are likely to believe in.
Your inability to identify with your peers in these irrational terms, will then make it harder for you to see yourself as one of them and make it hard for them to see you as one of them.
To make us feel more connected towards our own generation, we have to increase our intra-generational identity, but how do we increase our intra-generational identity without it negatively impacting our intergenerational identity? That is the question.
One way to do it is by increasing our experience with our peer group and let our intragenerational identity develop naturally.
Identity is not only formed by indoctrination, but also by experience.
We might come from different backgrounds, but we share the same time and space here in Malaysia. Over time, our shared experiences of living in the same time and space should technically allow us to develop an experiential identity that will supersede our indoctrinated identity.
The problem however is that in Malaysia, the development of experiential identity is being impeded by power politics.
Political power and identity are intimately linked.
Political power depends on numbers of adherents, and numbers of adherents depend on identity.
If you identify with a million people, you will feel like you are one with a million people. Whichever group that can make its members feel a sense of oneness with a million people, will amass a lot of political power.
The multiple racial groups in Malaysia are used to the political power that comes from having a large number of adherents. To not lose their political power, each racial group are not keen on giving up their vernacular schools, which is the main channel of recruiting new adherents into their group.
Other than being disinclined to do away with vernacular schools, the minority racial groups are also suspicious of the motives of the national schools.
Instead of seeing the national school as an effort to increase the experiential identity of Malaysian students, they are seeing the national school as the indoctrinating agent of one racial group, which they feel has taken over the national school agenda.
In other words, they are seeing the national schools as an agency that is being used by one race, to indoctrinate the children of others races away from the racial identity of their parents, while converting them into becoming the new recruits of their own racial group, to alter the power balance between the racial groups in the country.
Despite the many ways that they argue about it, at the crux of it, this is the core of the dispute in regards to vernacular schools in Malaysia.
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