Mother tongue education activists briefed opposition members of Parliament today on the shortcomings of the vision school concept and why it must be rejected.

Civil rights committee members and representatives from Chinese and Tamil schools met with DAP and Barisan Alternatif MPs separately at the parliament lobby to seek their assistance in raising the issue in the House during debate time.

CRC spokesperson Wong Chin Huat said those who defended mother tongue education should not be accused of being sources of national disunity, nor of wanting to establish a Chinese or Indian state within Malaysia.

What about national schools such as Mara colleges, Islamic religious schools and Malay primary schools which have 99 percent Malay students? Arent they also sources of national disunity? queried Wong.

Wong called those who hurl such accusations narrow-minded and ancient, noting that the issue has also been exploited by political parties fishing for votes during election time.

This is no different from kongsi gelap (secret society) extorting money from the people, he said.

Wong said the vision school project was not practical as school children would suffer the avoidable hassle of having to travel far from their homes just to go to and from school as well as to wake up early but return home late.

Policies, not mother tongue

Another activist, M Mano, representing Tamil schools, said Indian Malaysians rejected the concept at the outset but had no choice but to enrol their children in vision schools as some of their schools have been scrapped off.

Mano urged the MPs to raise the issue in Parliament as a national issue and not as a community issue, with the justification that national integration involves every citizen.

We should tell them (the government) that it is not our mother tongues that are guilty of disuniting people, it is the existing education policies that are doing it, he said.

Gan Wah Lien, representing the Subang Jaya-USJ Chinese School Development Working Committee, said government representatives, such as Subang Jaya state assembly representative Lee Hwa Beng, had made promises to them for fun.

Lee had promised the Subang Jaya and USJ community that the vision school planned for the area would be converted to a Chinese school before the last general election.

Gan said, the committee had collected about 25,000 signatures to lobby for the conversion but the effort has been ignored.

Next victim

When asked, MP for Bukit Mertajam, DAPs Chong Eng said the government representatives would only respond effectively if they knew they were going to lose in the coming elections.

She said raising the issue in Parliament was not as effective as lobbying MCA representatives and giving them the indication that they would lose the constituency if they do not resolve the issue.

Kamaruddin Jaafar (PAS-Tumpat) said he understood the struggles of Chinese and Tamil schools as the government is planning to amend the Education Act to place all schools under its restriction and powers.

The amendments to the Education Act have been raised in Parliament this session. The new victims [this time] will be Islamic religious schools, he said.

It is very clear that the ruling Barisan Nasional government wants to curtail anything that would challenge its power, he added.