By Ravinder Singh
It’s amazing that people who are supposed to be learned would say things that make them appear to be naïve about the realities of this world.
Aidil Khalid of the Concerned Lawyers for Justice (CLJ) recently hit out at Farah Halijah for saying that Chinese schools promote unity. She studied at a Chinese school and was speaking from first hand experience, but Aidil dismissed her view as a “hasty generalisation”.
According to Farah, she was never subjected to verbal abuse while she was in school. This contrasts with the experience of some non-Malays in national schools, where the medium of instruction is the national language.
Furthermore, she said, Chinese schools cared for Muslim students, even providing prayer rooms for them. She might therefore have been right when she said Chinese schools promoted national unity.
CLJ has yet to provide credible evidence to support its stand that education in a single language is what promotes national unity in a country. In fact, this is not borne out by the international news that we read. The members of the warring factions in the Arab world must have all been educated in Arabic.
Indeed, the history of civil wars tells us that people speaking the same language are not necessarily united.
Aidil cites legal authorities to support his view about the “destructive and damaging” effects of vernacular schools. He should be reminded that court decisions are made by humans who have sometimes been proven wrong. We have had at least one such case where the “landmark” decision of the Federal Court on a land matter was, about ten years later, overruled by another bench of the Federal Court, criticising the earlier decision as being “manifestly wrong”.
National unity is not built by compelling everyone in a country to learn and use a national language. A national language is a common language for administrative purposes.
National unity is rooted in the hearts of people. It is useless having everyone fluent in the national language when that same language is used to condemn and insult persons of different beliefs and cultures, creating walls between them.
On the other hand, you can have people of different religions, beliefs and cultures living happily together despite not being fluent in a national language. This was what Malaysia used to be.
Isn’t it sad that it is the abuse of the national language by politicians, self-appointed “defenders of the race”, vigilantes, school authorities and academicians that has disunited Malaysians?
The national language should never have been used to create disunity with all the vitriol that has been churned out with it. It should have been maintained as the language of love and kindness, as was the case until about half a century ago.
CLJ would do well to take to task all those people who are using the national language to create disunity. Turn it into a language of love, happiness, cheer, compassion, care and all other good things. It is these that bring people together, and that is unity.
There is no need to cite court judgments and or make academic pronouncements. They mean nothing when the reality on the ground is that it is the use of the national language itself that has brought about disunity.
When a language becomes a language of peace and love, people will on their own develop an interest to learn and use it.
Ravinder Singh is an FMT reader.
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