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A public inquiry should be conducted as to who were the "hijackers" of the double "hijacking" of the national school system from its original aim to cater to all races and who must be held responsible for allowing such prolonged double "hijacking" to go on for some three decades without correction Media Statement by Lim Kit Siang (Penang, Friday): The Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamad said in the New Straits Times interview yesterday that the national school system had been "hijacked" from its original objective of catering to all races in Malaysia, with the NST carrying it as the front-page lead story under the page one headline: "School system 'hijacked'" followed by the secondary headline: "Dr. Mahathir: Non-Muslims being alienated by extremism". Mahathir said in the interview: "The idea was to set up a school system that would cater to all races in Malaysia. But we find that the people who run the schools have other ideas. For example, when we provide for pupil's own language, they try to deny the right of the Chinese and Indians to learn their own languages, and they don't make an effort to provide the necessary teachers. "They have also tried to introduce Islamic practices into the school system to the extent that non-Muslims have become alienated. For example, in the past, we had no problems with girls wearing skirts and boys wearing shorts, especially for games. Now boys are forbidden from wearing shorts, even for games, and even games are discouraged. These are individual interpretations of what Islam is all about, and eventually of course, this puts off the non-Malays and they go back to their own schools. "On the other hand, the Malays themselves reject the national schools because they say it's not Islamic enough, and they want to go to an Islamic school. "They choose Islamic schools that are really badly staffed with people who are not qualified. They do not learn religion, they learn politics, the politics of a certain party. That is why almost everyone who goes to a sekolah agama rakyat comes out hating the Government, simply because that is what is taught in the school." A public inquiry should be conducted as to who were the "hijackers" of the "double hijacking" of the national school system from its original aim to cater to all races and who should be held responsible for allowing such prolonged double "hijacking" to go on for some three decades without correction. The purpose of such a public inquiry is not so much to engage in an exercise of finger-pointing or blame-apportionment, but to identify the root causes of the malady afflicting the national education system not for one year or even ten years but for the past three decades. If we are still not prepared to pinpoint the root problems of our national education system as well as who and why they had been allowed to run unchecked and unnoticed by the relevant authorities, it is unlikely that we could re-establish a national education system to meet the twin objectives of forging national unity of our multi-racial, multi-lingual, multi-cultural and multi-religious population and providing high-quality education to meet the challenges of globalization, liberalization and information and communications technology. Mahathir had pinpointed two particular aspects whereby the national school system had been "hijacked" from its original aim to cater to all races in Malaysia - sabotaging the Pupil's Own Language (POL) programme and turning the national schools into Islamic rather than Malaysian schools - but he makes the mistake of assuming that these two "hijackings" are committed by the same set of "hijackers". The "hijackers" of the national school system who sabotaged the POL programme are not the same "hijackers" who made the national schools more Islamic than Malaysian schools and turned away the non-Malays, as the first "hijacking" in "denying the right of the Chinese and Indians to learn their own languages" took place very much earlier as far back as the seventies while the second "hijacking" only began in the eighties. I do not think it is fair for Mahathir to pin on the "obscurantists" who "hijacked" the national school system by making it more Islamic than Malaysian the blame for the earlier "hijacking" of the system by sabotaging the POL programme, causing non-Malays to send their children to Chinese and Tamil primary schools instead of national primary schools. The phenomenon of some 90 per cent of Chinese pupils attending Chinese primary schools in the seventies predates the "hijacking" of the national schools to make them more Islamic than Malaysian which started in the eighties and was caused by the sudden policy change in the shutdown of all English-medium primary schools in the early 70s. This was illustrated by the fact that by 1977, when Mahathir was still the Education Minister, 87 per cent of the Chinese students were attending the Chinese primary schools, or 478,849 out of a total of 550,545 Chinese primary pupils were in Chinese primary schools. It was not that the problem of POL and the denial of the right of the Chinese and Indians to learn their own language in the national schools was never highlighted or brought to the government's attention - as this was the constant theme of the DAP in Parliament in the seventies, eighties and nineties. There should be a national soul-searching as to who were responsible for the two "hijackings" of the national school system in the past 30 years, why there were allowed to derail the original aim to cater to all races in Malaysia, and who should be held responsible for such prolonged double "hijacking". In the past three decades, the Education Ministers were: 1974 - 1978 Dr. Mahathir Mohamad 1978 - 1981 Musa Hitam 1981 - 1984 Dr. Sulaiman Daud 1984 - 1986 Abdullah Ahmad Badawi 1986 - 1991 Anwar Ibrahim 1991 - 1995 Dr. Sulaiman Daud 1995 - 1999 Mohd. Najib Tun Razak 1999 -          Musa Mohamad Must all these seven current and former Education Ministers bear responsibility for the prolonged double "hijacking" of the national school system or only some but not all of them, and if so, who? (27/12/2002) * Lim Kit Siang, DAP National Chairman