Malaysia is a multicultural, multilingual, multi-ethnic society. The country is composed of three major ethnic groups. Indigenous Malaysians, or Bumiputera, which literally translates as “princes of the soil,” are numerically dominant—their largest single group, Malays, makes up slightly more than half of the country’s population. Bumiputera coexist with two large minority communities: Chinese and Indian Malaysians. These communities make up around 23 percent and 7 percent of the country’s population, respectively.
This ethnic diversity has played a defining role in Malaysia’s modern history. Public policy decisions have long been shaped by the often-conflicting goals of protecting the special privileges of various ethnic communities and bringing all Malaysians together as equal members of a unified nation. Over the years, attempts to balance these goals have produced a succession of uneasy compromises and differential approaches to the treatment of different ethnic groups.
Ethnic considerations have also strongly shaped Malaysian education. At some levels of the education system, three parallel systems exist, each catering to a specific ethnic group while referring to nationwide standards and guidelines. At others, all Malaysians can gather under a single roof, although doors open more easily for some ethnic groups than others.
The Colonial Legacy
The seeds of this situation were planted by the policies of the British Empire. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the British slowly expanded their control over the Malay peninsula and northern Borneo, attracted by the land’s rich reserves of tin and rubber.
But exploiting those reserves required a sizable workforce. Unable to attract enough native Malays to work in the colony’s lucrative tin mines and rubber plantations, the British turned increasingly to immigrant labor. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British actively aided immigration from India and Sri Lanka to work on rubber plantations and in public works. They also encouraged immigration from South China to work in tin mines, which even prior to the arrival of the British had often been owned and operated by immigrants from China.1
Although the British worked to coopt the Malay aristocracy, towards the majority of the Malay population, who largely lived as subsistence farmers and fishermen, the British adopted a policy they termed “minimum interference.” While this policy allowed most Malays to continue cultivating the soil and fishing, at least in the short term, it also sharply separated them from the economic centers of the country and its growing money economy.2
As a result, at independence in 1957, huge disparities in wealth separated Bumiputera and non-Bumiputera, while occupation and geographic location closely followed ethnic divisions. Non-Bumiputera, and Chinese Malaysians in particular, tended to live in cities along peninsular Malaysia’s western coast, where they dominated the nation’s trade and commerce, while most Malays and other Bumiputera remained scattered in rural communities working the soil.
While Chinese Malaysians tended to dominate the economy, Bumiputera, and Malays in particular, dominated politics.3 The constitution ratified in 1957 made Bahasa Melayu, the language spoken by most Bumiputera, the new nation’s only official language. More controversially, the constitution also asserted the privileged status of Malays and other Bumiputera. Article 153 of the constitution made it the responsibility of the head of state to “safeguard the special position of the Malays and natives of any of the States of Sabah and Sarawak.”
Link : https://wenr.wes.org/2023/01/education-in-malaysia-2
