The United Chinese School Committees’ Association of Malaysia (Dong Zong) has distributed a booklet today to explain its grievances against the National Education Blueprint 2013-2025 (NEB).

This came ahead of the Chinese education group’s Nov 25 protest against the blueprint, which will be held at Padang Timur, Petaling Jaya, at 11am.

The 24-page booklet contains ‘Dong Zong’s open letter to all Malaysians’ in Malay, Chinese and English.

In addition, there is a 10-point Q&A-style explanation of the issue, expressions of support from Chinese Malaysian groups and related news clippings and editorials opposing the NEB, a map to the protest venue, and promotional posters.

It urges Malaysians of all ethnic groups to join and support the protest.

The booklet says that the NEB is the latest attempt to implement the ‘ultimate goal’ of the 1956 Razak Report, which is to set up a single-stream education system with the Malay language as the medium of instruction.

“When the earlier two education blueprints were launched by 2009, the Education Ministry had announced that they want Chinese and Tamil primary schools to use Malay as the medium of instruction from Year 1 to Year 3.

“This plan would have changed the identity of Chinese and Tamil primary schools starting from language classes, and thus was objected to by various groups especially Chinese education groups and NGOs and was eventually dropped.

“Now, the Education Ministry wants to use the NEB to change Chinese and Tamil primary schools to reach the ‘ultimate goal’,” the booklet says.

The booklet also rebuts BN secretary-general Tengku Adnan Mansor’s statement that Dong Zong’s demands stem from greed and are vexatious .

It asserts that its requests are reasonable to protect the nation’s multicultural education system as a national asset.