14/06/2021
Education in Malaysia is overseen by the Ministry of Education (Kementerian Pendidikan). Although education is the responsibility of the Federal Government, each state and federal territory has an Education Department to co-ordinate educational matters in its territory. The main legislation governing education is the Education Act 1996.
The education system is divided into preschool education, primary education, secondary education, post-secondary education and tertiary education. It is further divided into national and private education. Education may be obtained from the multilingual national school system, which provides free education for all Malaysians, or private schools, or through homeschooling. International and private institutions charge school fees. By law, primary education is compulsory.
As in many Asia-Pacific countries such as the Republic of Korea, Singapore and Japan, standardised tests are a common feature. Currently, there are 43 universities, 31 private university colleges, 9 foreign university branch campuses and 414 private colleges in Malaysia.
Many decades ago, Missionaries of Christian denominations, such as the Roman Catholic religious orders - particularly the Lasallian Brothers and the Sisters of the Holy Infant Jesus - Seventh-day Adventists, Anglicans, and Methodists established a series of "private missionary schools" which provided primary and secondary education in the English language.
Almost all of these were single-sex schools. These schools were fee-paying and some had boarding schools attached to them. They were seen as "providing the best education" owing to the fact that they used "English as their medium of instruction".
Although nowadays these missionary schools have fully assimilated into the Malay-medium national school system and most admit students regardless of gender and background, many of the schools remain single-sex and still bear their original names, such as the ones with the names of saints or words such as "Catholic", "Convent", "Advent" and "Methodist".
By the 1960s, the government no longer charged fees at primary schools with a Malay-language medium; fees for Malay-medium primary schools were abolished by the Education Act of 1961 and "abolished with affect" by 1966. The missionary schools providing a curriculum in the English-language medium continued to charge fees which were "regulated by the government". By the 1980s, missionary schools were offering a curriculum - primary and secondary - in the Malay-language medium and thus no longer required to charge fees. However, donations from these school's alumni and their families are still paid today.
The UCSCAM believed that the government of Malaysia had a "final goal" (referring to the Razak Report) to eradicate the Chinese schools and Tamil schools. The report claimed that the government of Malaysia's culture and language education policy, over the past 50 years was, to not give up implementation of the "final goal": a final "national school" with the Malay language (National language) as the main medium of instruction.
The language of other ethnic groups, namely Chinese and Tamil, thus could only serve as a foreign language.
The reason given by the government was that the Chinese and Tamil primary schools were the root cause of disunity of this country. To achieve "national unity", all other non-national schools should be restricted, and finally merged with the national school.
Education in Malaysia is monitored by the federal government Ministry of Education. In July 2006, Higher Education Deputy Minister Datuk Ong Tee Keat stated that a review of the controversial Universities and University Colleges Act 1971 will be held among Malaysian MPs.
The ruling political alliance is composed of ethnically based parties and one of the concessions allowed by the controlling Malay party is to allow the Chinese and Indian parties to start colleges.
