The 1 Sekolah Debacle

I commented on 1 Sekolah issue on Dr Rafick's blog:-

Dr
I respect and admire your writting. On this issue, I am actually for and support single school system, but I need to clarify a few things:

If I am not mistaken the single stream school system has already in place since merdeka ( of course in between we change from BE to BM) and Chinese/Tamil stream school are only available at the primary level. Furthermore, this vernacular system is funded 99.9% by the Chinese and Indian community respectively. Unless ones work for these vernacular schools, you would not understand the teachers’ condition, the welfare/salary, etc. are not compatible to what the national schools’ teachers are getting. The new building, equipment and all are antirely funded by the community themselves. So if this is not enough, I dont know what else the government can do or wants to do to kill off the vernacular system. Establishing 1 Sekolah is good, but unless the Government chass away all the Chinese and Indian, there will always be a need for this vernacular schools. The need for this vernacular school I think is really only about learning the basic spoken Mandarin/Tamil, because as I observe, majority of the parents would send their kids to National Secondary Schools and later university. The goverment must also understand it’s the race-based political system that give birth to everything race based from education to applying for an IC. I may be wrong, but dont make the vernacular system the scapegoat for government’s failure in forging a united Malaysia.

Dr Rafick 's reply:

Yeap Cheng Liang

Thank you for the admiration. The feeling is mutual when I read your level headed comments which presented in a very professional manner. We need more people like you.
I am not sure about the history portion you mentioned. As indicated there is a lot of misconception here. There is no where we suggest that all other schools is to be close down.
In the single stream, all types of schools are allowed to exist but the government funding applies ony for the national school.
In other words, religious school, chinese school, Tamil school and other similar school must come under the private school category and they have to operate on the basis of charity and business.
Trust this clarifies