English in Singapore and Malaysia 21
Under British colonial rule, whether by divisive decree or laissez faire
rule, Malay, Chinese and Tamil vernacular schools were allowed to flourish,
while education in English was restricted to the elite minority. However, in
preparation for independence, the British commissioned the Barnes Report
(1951) which proposed Malay-English bilingualism, where only Malay and
English would be taught in the National schools and be established as
Malaysia’s official languages. The Barnes Report recommended that Malay,
as the mother tongue of the dominant ethnic group, play a central role in
education in the country — priority in funding for elementary education,
for example, was to be given to the National Schools which used Malay as
the medium of instruction. The report deemed mother tongue education
not to be worth public expense, and in effect advocated that the Chinese
and Indians should be encouraged to give up their vernacular schools
and opt for schools which had Malay as the only local language taught.
However, in keeping with British interests, the report also advocated that
Malay should give way to the English language as a medium of instruction
at the secondary and tertiary levels (Gill 2005).
The Barnes Report was of course met with opposition from both the
Indians and the Chinese who, while willing to accept Malay as the sole
national language on the basis of its status as Malaysia’s indigenous
language, did not agree to Malay and English as the only official languages
(Lee 2007). The Fenn-Wu Report (1951) was commissioned, ostensibly to
review Chinese education in the country, but which offered an opposing
proposal. It recommended the establishment of a multilingual national
education system with four official languages — English, Malay, Chinese
and Tamil — a proposal that we saw being taken up by the Singapore
government. In 1952, the Education Ordinance in its evaluation of the
two reports favoured the Barnes Report, which led to the establishment
of the bilingual national school system where either Malay or English was
used with the view of establishing a Malay-medium system in the long
run. However, the Razak Report in 1956, chaired by the then Minister
for Education Abdul Razak bin Hussain, overturned these decisions and
supported the development of mother tongue education and vernacular
schools. It recommended the establishment of:
a national system of education acceptable to the people of the federation
as a whole which will satisfy the need to promote their cultural, social,
economic and political development as a nation, having regard to the