The government would be putting the “cart before the horse” if it mandated single-stream education before abolishing race-based political parties which more than anything else foments ethnic cocoons in Malaysia.

DAP national vice-chair M Kulasegaran described Unmo vice-president and Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi’s (right) urging for the abolishment of education in vernacular languages because it causes ethnic cocoons as “a classic instance of ignoring the elephant in the room while focusing on the gnat in the distance.”

“You are not going to get the people together through single-stream education without first abolishing race-based political parties,” said the MP for Ipoh Barat.

The DAP leader was commenting on the suggestion aired by Zahid ( left ) that single stream education was the main cause of ethnic cocoons which kept Malaysians separate in their racial ghettoes.  

“Zahid’s proposal puts the cart before the horse. Ethnic cocoons will persist so long as political organisation and struggle is channelled through race-based parties,” asserted the federal legislator.

“Politics dominates society and so if political mobilization and struggle are channelled through race-based parties, racial factors will outweigh all other considerations in policy formulation and implementation.

“Therefore to say that vernacular education foments disunity among the people more than race-based political mobilisation is a classic instance of ignoring the elephant in the room while focusing on the gnat in the distance,” he argued.

Kulasegaran (left) said the past two decades in the history of primary and secondary school education in Malaysia have seen pupils flee the national schools for vernacular ones because of the racial and religious polarisation that blights the system in the former stream.

“To ignore the causes of this reality is to close your eyes to the elephant in the room which is what is entailed by Zahid’s suggestion,” he said.