INTRODUCTION

It may come as a surprise that as of 2007, the Tamil school education in Malaysia would have completed its 190 years of existence. That itself is a saga of a remarkable tenacity and durable relevance in an inhospitable environment, to the surprise of many within and outside the Tamil community.

The Tamil school system largely owes its origin to the migration of Tamils from Tamil Nadu, South India (formerly the Madras Presidency) who were brought in to toil in the British-owned rubber plantations in the then British-administered Malaya. Presently, Malaysian Indians comprise 8.5 per cent of the population. Tamils, the largest of the motley language groups that make up the Indian community in Malaysia, constitute more than 80 per cent of the group.

Malaysia's colonial experience and its ethnocentric nation-building ideology shaped the education policies of the past since independence in 1957. Today, these policies are also increasingly being influenced by the imperatives of globalization and the need for English Language as a language of business in a highly competitive world trade environment. These present policies, to say the least, are also inimical to the development of Tamils schools in Malaysia. Most statistics pertaining to Tamil schools are quite distressing. In 2000, the Yayasan Strategik Sosial (YSS), a research arm of Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC), the dominant Indian political party and part of the ruling government coalition, published a report on the status of the Tamil schools. Some of the vital statistics are as shown in Table 22.1.

The advocates of a monolithic national education system, while rejecting the reintroduction of English as a language of instruction for science and mathematics subjects are nevertheless antagonistic to the continued existence of the non-Malay vernacular education system. The main argument being that this vernacular education does not contribute to the integration of the children of different ethnic groups in their formative years. Forty-nine years of independence has yet to resolve the question whether unity and integration must only be achieved to the detriment of cultural and language identity. Moreover, there is hardly a recognition accorded to the cultural needs of a community other than the dominant community in the national educational system.