Instant unity has not been patented yet, which is a hard bite on the hope to forge integration in Malaysia outside the common schooling experience.

Ernest Renan, who defined a nation as large-scale solidarity based upon the feelings of past sacrifices and the willingness to sacrifice again for the future, was sadly quite right about what is missing in plural Malaysian society.

Regardless of the fact that members of the major races have fought together against the nation’s foes and together, they contributed to the country’s growth and development, the three major races cannot be said to have achieved integration at any time in the history of the country.

Memories are not something we can rely on to build unity in plural and competing ethnicities. As many have observed, it is the grievances that are more reliably remembered than the shared triumphs in our separate memories.

About 95 percent of Chinese parents send their children to national-type Chinese primary schools and a smaller percentage pursue the same stream to secondary and tertiary levels.

Chinese schools are not about mother-tongue education, as are Tamil primary schools. In the Chinese schools, the medium of instruction is Mandarin, the Chinese national language and which is quite apart from the mother-tongues of the several Chinese tribes that have made Malaysia their home.

Malaysian Chinese have a separate nationality and are members of a successful diaspora in the world. How we are going to get the community to override its demand for a separate commonwealth to integrate with the others has been a matter deliberated from the Barnes Education Report of 1951, and has since become a never-ending story.

In recent years, Malaysian Indians too have become a diaspora their motherland espouses.

The Malays and other Bumiputeras are caught in between these grand dispersals of nationalities that are bound to be playing big roles in the world.

Chinese and Indians shun careers in the army and police force. However, they willingly apply to become commissioned officers in all branches of the armed-forces.

Discussions 10 years ago ended in a compromise solution. The government decided on a half-way measure, i.e. to pool the vernacular primary schools into a shared compound in which students and teachers may share some classes and co-operate in extra-curricula activities.

The idea was named Vision Schools (Sekolah Wawasan), a float from inside a great debate on how to herd the Malaysian plural ethnicities into a single identity, a single sense of nationality and a shared destiny.

To pursue a single schooling experience would be asking too much against the residing chauvinism and against the real need of the various communities to retain their mother-tongues. Hence, the half-way measure – Vision Schools.

But on what basis will the Vision Schools work to help forge the single sense of nationality? Can Vision Schools bring about ‘large scale solidarity’?

It would need much more than that, obviously, and much more than a revised or reformed common curriculum too.

So, Mukhriz Mahathir who is contesting for the top post in Umno Youth, asked for the closure of vernacular schools and to coral pluralism into a single educational system for high-speed integration.

But MIC president, Samy Vellu said that Vision Schools would have worked had the Prime Minister not neglected them.

The half-way measure suggested a slower approach to the same thing Mukhriz had wanted outright.

Leaving things the way they are would be akin to the Ottoman system of millat , whereby each community is separately governed by representatives who share power with the host.

Of Turkey, Renan wrote, "The Turk, the Slav, the Greek, the Armenian, the Arab, the Syrian and the Kurd are today as distinct as they were on the day of the conquest".

In Malaysia, even if we now live side-by-side in corporate housing schemes, there’s too little that is shared between the ethnic communities to say we have a ‘Malaysian society’.

Of course Vision Schools can help. But there are merely five or six of such schools, all reportedly "very successful", before the prime minister deemed the idea useless.

Former Deputy Minister of Education, Aziz Shamsuddin, has previously said that in Vision Schools, the children mixed well and the staff co-operated to organise extra-curricular activities.

In other words, we do have a modest advantage in the Vision Schools. The children learn to share and teachers/parents loosen much of their mutual suspicions.

Mukhriz, because he is contesting for the Umno Youth chief’s post, is considered to be seeking for political mileage by suggesting the closure of all vernacular schools. He is, in fact, voicing a popular thought among Malays in the current political setting.

Some non-Malays have been demanding meritocracy and equality, i.e. to do away with Malay special privileges, without wishing to even pay lip-service to unity and integration.

That is an absurd demand in the given circumstances. You’ll need a two-thirds majority in Parliament to alter the constitution. Without that, the noisy demands are only hot-air.