For a multi-racial country like Malaysia, the best way of ensuring national unity is through the education process. If students grow up together under a systematic national education process, they will one day end up loving the country more and respecting their counterparts better.

In other words, Malaysians have to be reminded that if they grow up under too many education systems within the national education policy, they shall end up being further polarised among ourselves.

In other words, the country has to have a definitive national education policy that will ensure that all Malaysians undergo the same process and procedures of education and examinations. If the education system is divisive in nature, then those who are educated in that system will naturally grow up being divided.

No matter what the government does to bring about national unity in the country, it would only remain superficial and be a mere lip-service if our children are still made to feel that they are being alienated by race, religion or origin.

Unfortunately, not many entrusted to ensure an impartial education policy to all Malaysians realise this fact. Some are too zealous and nationalistic in feelings that they only feel for their own kind and that only their group of people should be made to progress better in life at the expense of all other Malaysians.

As a result of this divisiveness in our education system, a case in point that has again cropped up is the university entrance debacle. Firstly, students are made to go through two examinations - matriculation and the STPM - in order to seek entrance into local universities.

This system itself has made our children feel that they are divided into two distinct social groups despite the fact that leaders never stop harping on the need for all Malaysians to be united.

Secondly, these two university entrance programmes are unequal in terms of duration and the level of difficulty. In other words, there cannot be genuine meritocracy if two benchmarks are used to gauge students' performance - no matter what explanations and reasons the authorities come up with to justify their claims that there is meritocracy in the system.

Hence, this has caused a lot of dissatisfaction among students and parents. Some feel that they are discriminated against just because they do not belong to a certain privileged class of people.

In the long run, therefore, how are these students going to feel about themselves in relation to the others who are more privileged within the nation? There is bound to be perpetual disunity in society.

If the noble aim of these examinations is to help the rural and the underprivileged in our society then it would be better for the authority to revert to the earlier system when the intake ratio was fixed at 55:45 (bumiputera: non-bumiputera) for public universities.

All students have to go through the same entrance examination and all should have access to any of the institutions found in the country irrespective of race, religion or origin.

Thus, the education system we are practising now, in many aspects, has failed to make the people feel that they are all Malaysians - aggravating further the process of national unity and the creation of a Bangsa Malaysia .