It is part of a wider pattern across Malaysia. It was frequently reported earlier in March that all 20 major one students attending the Si Chin Chinese School in Bahau, Negeri Sembilan, were Malays.
About 20 % of individuals in all Chinese primary schools across the nation in 2024 are non-Chinese, according to advocate Arun Doraisamy of the Malaysia Centre of Vernacular School Excellence.
However, these Taiwanese colleges, which are attracting more foreign students, have drawn criticism from some who claim they are a barrier to Malaysia’s spirit of unity and want them shut down.
Following a recent court decision that language schools in the country are not unlawful, the debate has raged for decades and has since resurrected.
Surprisedly for Mdm Siti and her father, some outsiders in the class did not want them to enroll their two children because the couple and their kids did not know Mandarin.
My companion told me not to be deceived and that it would take some time before the children had become proficient at it, but I doubted myself.
SCHOOLING SYSTEM IN MALAYSIA
Key education’s national and vernacular schools are divided into Tamil moderate schools and Chinese schools. These universities have the same curriculum as federal colleges, barring the speech subjects.
In the national primary schools, Malay serves as the medium of education, while Mandarin and Tamil, both, serve as the channels of training and communication.
There were 7,780 primary schools in Malaysia at the time of the Ministry of Education’s statistics in 2020.
Of these, 5,875 were federal institutions, 1,299 were Chinese universities, 527 were Tamil schools and the remaining were special education schools, exclusive design schools as well as government-aided spiritual schools.
According to the latest info from Mr Doraisamy, there are 1,831 language primary schools in Malaysia this time – 1,301 Chinese and 530 Tamil.
Once they have finished their main education, they can enroll in independent or regional secondary schools.
There are 82 Chinese state secondary schools ( also known as SMJK) and 63 separate Chinese great schools in Malaysia, despite the absence of any Tamil secondary schools.
As of 2021, there were completely 2,444 extra schools in Malaysia, including the SMJKs.
The SMJKs were again Chinese-medium schools, but they decided to use the Malay vocabulary and the government’s help program. These institutions also give their kids more time to study Mandarin in parallel.
The independent Chinese high schools, on the other hand, are not government funded and use the Unified Examination Certificate ( UEC ) syllabus, which is not recognised by the Malaysian government.