YBhg Professor Emeritus Dato’ Dr Khoo Kay Kim, a well known historian in
Malaysia, proposed that Malaysia, for the sake of national unity, should
consider abolishing the present multi-streams education system and to adopt a
uni-stream education system instead recently. This proposal has drawn harsh
criticisms from the Chinese community, and reminded Dr Khoo that the
multi-streams education system is protected by Malaysia's Constitution, and no
one should ever try to abolish it. The critics said Dr Khoo is obviously only
well verse with Malays historic events but not of the other races. They
suspected he knew very little about Chinese history in Malaysia for, even as a
Chinese, he is not educated in Chinese hence not able to study Chinese history
in depth. If he did, he should realize that education is the core concern of the
Chinese community and the only one thing they are very sensitive about, their
struggles in the past all centred around the education system. In the eyes of
the Chinese community, Dr. Khoo is not a true Chinese, he is just a person who
happens to have a Chinese name, and who has sold himself to the government for
the glamorous title and positions he is holding now. The naive argument that
multi-lingual and multi-cultural are the stumbling stones to nation unity holds
no water. If this is true, countries like Thailand, Indonesia, Burma, Korea and
Philipines where uni-stream education system is adopted should be very united
and peaceful. But are they? My advice to Dr. Khoo is to start learning Chinese,
then study the history of the Chinese community in Malaysia in depth.
