12. 16 May: The story behind Teachers’ Day in Malaysia (Part 3)
“The last racially segregated Vernacular primary school in Malaya will cease to exist when the parents of the children attending it believe that a local National school would provide a more acceptable education. The Fenn-Wu Report, Chapter III, paragraph 23, suggests that day may never come. We believe it will come.”
Thus wrote the Central Advisory Committee on Education (CACE) on 10 September 1951, in response to the recommendations of the Barnes Report and Fenn-Wu Report earlier that year.
The framing could not have been more apt — this was, indeed, a battle of beliefs. While mundanely referred to until today as ‘reports’, these two documents presented distinct and diametrically opposed worldviews about how to build a united Malaya. On the one hand, the Barnes Report advocated for language as a unifier, albeit being somewhat non-committal about that language being English or Malay in the spirit of compromise. On the other hand, the Fenn-Wu Report put forth a more aggressively pluralist vision of a future Malaya, seeking to find a permanent place for vernacular schools (particularly Chinese schools) within a Malayan context.
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We will pick things up from here in today’s post — which is Part 3 of 16 May: The Story Behind Teachers’ Day in Malaysia, a series that I hope will help us better appreciate the historical significance of this date to Malaysian teachers, and more broadly, our education system. In Part 1, we learned that 16 May commemorates the endorsement of the seminal Razak Report, which has marks on Malaysia’s education system until even today. In Part 2, we looked at the post-World War II era — specifically, official British attempts to move towards a national education system for Malaya. Today, we look at the closing chapter that culminates in the Razak Report in 1956.
Let’s get our nerd on!
*Note on references: Where excerpts are quoted, I try to reference the source documents myself. But where I’ve not been able to find a publicly available version (as is the case with the Special Committee report 1952 or the White Paper 1954), I’ve relied on secondhand references from a book I am reading: Tan Yao Sua’s Educational Development in Malaysia: Issues and Challenges.
An attempt at reconciliation
The earlier excerpt was from the Report on the Barnes Report on Malay Education and the Fenn-Wu Report on Chinese Education — or sometimes termed simply as the Second Report of the CACE.
In a nutshell, as you would have gleaned from that passage, the Second Report reaffirmed that the lens through which the British saw education policy — that is, language was presumed to be a necessary instrument for unifying the Malayan people. At some level, one could see this as a rejection of pluralist ideals, as far as the medium of instruction in education was concerned.
Does this mean that the Barnes Report had prevailed in this battle of beliefs over the Fenn-Wu Report? It is tempting to conclude to say ‘yes’, but the reality was more nuanced. In fact, the Second Report made further compromises that considered both those reports. This becomes clearer when we take a closer look at the contents of the Second Report.
The Second Report did maintain that national schools should use English and Malay as the media of instruction, as recommended in the Barnes Report. That said, it sought to assure that all languages of the land would be preserved as part of formal Malayan education (just not in the shape and form that the authors of the Fenn-Wu Report would have preferred).
The Second Report accepted that a “child’s earliest education should be in its mother tongue” — a view shared by both Barnes and Fenn-Wu — at least for the first two years of schooling. More broadly, it “agreed that no serious harm would be done […] by requiring all Chinese and Indian pupils to learn their mother tongue and Malay and English from the beginning of their third year” and that “provision should be made in all primary classes for Chinese and Indian pupils to receive instruction in Kuo Yu and Tamil respectively”. (Note: Kuo Yu literally means National Language, but in practice, refers to Mandarin)
These attempts, I would imagine, were presumably to assure that multilingualism had a place in Malayan education policy. These assurances would prove to be insufficient, and perhaps understandably so; after all, it is one thing to teach a language, it is another to make it the medium of instruction.
On the matter of vernacular schools, the Second Report expressed a larger shift in policy stance from the Barnes Report — or in its own framing, sought to assure that the Barnes Report had been misinterpreted. The Second Report clarified that “every means and opportunity” would be taken to meaningfully preserve the place of vernacular schools, at least temporarily.
Specifically, the Second Report expressed that “there is no intention of withdrawing Government asistance to vernacular schools until there are sufficient acceptable National Schools to take their place”. It also sought to assure that those teaching in vernacular schools would not be “thrown out of employment”; instead, “the process of re-organisation will be so carried out that no one’s ‘rice bowl will be broken’”.
Ten days after its release, the Second Report would be submitted to the Special Committee on Education appointed by the Federal Legislative Council. This Special Committee would eventually endorse the recommendations of the Second Report in September 1952, in yet another follow-up report.
Further details were also fleshed out in this report, such as to accommodate for the teaching of Mandarin and Tamil as language subjects in national schools to “those children whose parents so desire where there are at least 15 students in any standard who wish to take advantage of such facilities”. Again, assurances were made that vernacular schools would be protected “as an integral part of our educational system […] until… the Chinese themselves decide that they are not needed”.
With that, the follow-up report of the Special Committee would largely become codified as official policy — taking the form of the 1952 Education Ordinance. This would include the establishment of national schools, which used Malay and English as the media of instruction at the primary level — as advocated by the Barnes Report. But as we will see in the next section, this initiative would prove to be short-lived.
The British fail, again
The trajectory, as intended by the British, was crystal clear. But it was not backed by strong support from the Malayan people. In fact, views remained divided, and the resistance to British-led education policy would continue.
In the eyes of the Chinese educationists, the proposals under the Second Report — and by extension, the 1952 Education Ordinance — continued to be seen as not going far enough. If anything, the objections were intensifying. The movement became increasingly more organised, with the United Chinese School Teachers’ Association (UCSTA or Jiao Zong 教总) established in December 1951 to champion the cause. In November 1952, the MCA — under the helm of its founder Tan Cheng Lock — would issue a joint declaration with Chinese educationists to denounce the ordinance. Around the same time, there would even be calls that went as far as to demand for Mandarin to be recognised as one of the official languages of Malaya, going beyond the realm of educational policy!
Meanwhile, the Malays too were also not fully supportive of what the British had put forth in the 1952 Education Ordinance. While having the Malay language as a medium of instruction in primary education was welcome, there were doubts as to whether this policy tweak was more symbolic than substantive in improving the welfare of the Malays. After all, it would appear that ultimately, it was the English language — the language of the colonialists — that would be the dominant force in education, given that it would be the medium of instruction beyond primary schools.
And what of the Indian community? Unfortunately, in my research, I have not been able to clearly identify their views during this period. That said, I imagine that the Indians must not have enjoyed as much political influence in the discourse as the Chinese or the Malays; looking through the official documents at least, issues pertaining to the Indians or the Tamil language are often mentioned in passing, and rarely fleshed out. Notwithstanding this, it is plausible that the Indians — like the Chinese — would have also harboured concerns related to mother tongue education.
The implementation of the ordinance thus took place amid continued opposition across multiple fronts in Malaya. Coupled with financial challenges that the British were facing at the time, their vision of this national school project — no small undertaking in and of itself, even putting aside local resistance — seemed to be on its last and weary legs.
The last nail of the coffin would come in October 1954, when the British published the Report of the Special Committee on the Implementation of Educational Policy, or more commonly known as the White Paper. Unlike all the reports we’ve talked about so far, this one was not so much motivated by a need to engage local concerns, as it was to reckon with the British’s increasingly limited financial capabilities. To that end, the White Paper recommended a policy change that would be less costly, but politically risky — that is, to introduce national school features (English-medium classes) in existing vernacular schools.
Needless to say, this political gamble did not pay off. The Chinese educationists were not impressed. Lim Lian Geok, the then-president of the UCSTA and a firebrand for Chinese interests, was extremely critical of the White Paper, saying that “the Barnes Report announced that Chinese education would be eliminated; the Education Ordinance of 1952 sentenced it to death, and the White Paper on Education 1954 has now dug its grave”.
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The so-called grave, as it would turn out, would not be for Chinese education but the British vision for education policy in Malaya. The 1954 White Paper would not take off in a big way, and would become the final British attempt to directly build and shape Malayan education. It became clear that if anyone was going to take the lead, it would need to come from the people of Malaya themselves.
The path to independence, the path to the Razak Report
For the observant readers among you, you would already have noticed how the timelines between Malayan education and the path towards independence are already converging. This is no coincidence.
We will not go into the details of that journey towards independence; that would require another series altogether. For this post, it is adequate to say here is that the British would ultimately entrust the reins of the nation to the Alliance — a multiracial coalition comprising the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) and Malayan Indian Congress (MIC) — and along with it, the nuts and bolts of nation-building, including education policy.
Importantly, the Alliance coalition was underpinned by an ideology of “consociationalism”. This is a term I learned recently which is remarkably useful to describe Malayan — and indeed, Malaysian — politics for a large part of our history and political psyche. It simply means a model of power-sharing and cooperation where each ethnic group is presumed to be meaningfully represented by its elites; that is, these elites are assumed to negotiate in good faith, and that once negotiations reach an agreement, the broader members of each ethnic group will comply with whatever is agreed.
This model would prove crucial in determining the path ahead for Malayan education, as the 1955 elections loomed. The stakes of these elections were high; the Alliance sought to show that they had legitimacy to take over from the British as interim government. As it were, education would feature as an important issue in the Alliance’s campaign, for which a promise would be made to re-examine Malayan education policy in a manner that would be more amenable to the broader populace.
The Alliance, of course, would emerge as big winners in the 1955 elections. Promises made, including those on education, had to now be followed through and delivered. It was in that spirit that the Razak Report would be drafted and eventually endorsed in 1956.
Epilogue: some final reflections
We have now come full circle with this series.
The Razak Report — the endorsement of which Malaysia commemorates as Teachers’ Day — is by no means the closing chapter of our national story on education. But neither should it be seen as the opening chapter, as I have hoped to illustrate through this series. Rather, I would say that it was a major turning point in our journey of nation-building — one that sought to build from the lessons of failed attempts that came before, to institute a national education system that could unify a pluralistic society in its infancy.
Almost at every turn, we saw resistance by the Malayan people, even if the objections spoke to different values and worldviews. Admittedly, at some stages of my own reading, I wondered how anyone then could — at a tactical level — realistically think that this was a meaningful way to advance a negotiation; rather than carve out a middle ground, it seemed that ‘doubling down’ and dogma shaped the response, be it from the Malay or Chinese communities.
But as I reflected and read further, I arrived at a view that perhaps this staunch opposition can be attributed to the atmosphere of that era. Uncertainty must have reigned in the discourse then, with no obvious victor in what I’d described above as a battle of beliefs. At the same time, communal fears and post-colonial trauma might also have been a factor; indeed, this was why I painted the environment in the wake of the Japanese occupation in Part 2 last week.
For the Chinese, perhaps there was a sense among some quarters that the relevance of Chinese culture in Malaya would not be diminished in one fell swoop, but that it would be chipped away, slowly but surely. To that end, some may have felt the British version of the middle ground to be the beginning of an end, thereby calling for an uncompromising response.
Meanwhile, for the Malays, perhaps there was a suspicion that a lot of this was merely an extension of a colonial project, where there was no intent to design for upward mobility for the masses. As we explored in Part 1, at the height of British rule, Malay education essentially had two tracks as part of the divide-and-rule policy — one for the elites, and another for the peasantry — which were not designed for upward mobility.
All of this is important context for us to understand the magnitude of the challenge that the Razak Report set out to overcome. Recall how the Razak Report sought to “recommend an education policy acceptable to the people of the Federation as a whole”, with an intention to “make Malay the national language of the country whilst preserving and sustaining the growth of the languages and cultures of non-Malays living in this country” as part of a broader vision for schools with “a Malayan outlook”.
At first glance, a lot of these expressions may come across as platitudes and empty rhetoric. But as I look back on the history that came before it, I have come to develop a greater appreciation for what it represented — an attempt to establish middle ground and build from it. This was no small feat in and of itself; today, we understand how easily politics can become polarised, whether within or beyond our shores. For the folks back then, there was the added challenge of the times — the fear, distrust, anxiety across communal lines — exacerbated by the trauma of post-colonial life.
In hindsight, we know today that the Razak Report would not fully overcome all of these issues, even if it was enough of a foundation to help the nation move forward at the time. Fast forward to today, the role of language in education continues to be a hotly debated issue, be it among parents or politicians.
Is this the destiny of any society that seeks to remain multicultural in its makeup? Or is it simply the scars of the past, which are on the mend but not yet fully healed? Can we, as a nation, transcend these issues in our discourse on education? These are tough questions. My hope is that this series can help provide some historical perspective, as you form your own views about Malaysia’s educational future.
Until then, happy nerding!