24 Lubna Alsagoff
Institution Act which allowed the use of English in dual university
programmes affiliated with overseas institutions. To safeguard the special
position of the Malay language, the Education Act 1996 required that
Malay be included in the curriculum as a compulsory subject, where the
medium of instruction in private education institutions was other than
the national language.
The liberalization of higher education in private institutions, which
essentially meant the possible use of English as a medium of instruction
in such educational settings, created a divide between these institutions
and the public universities where the medium of instruction was Malay
(except for science and technology courses). The former were attended
by the privileged middle-class and upper-class Malays, Indians and
Chinese who could afford the high fees, while the latter largely benefitted
the working-class bumiputra who received subsidies on school fees and
were guaranteed places because of the special provision in the “racial
quota” policy. Although such policies were clearly meant to ensure the
rise in economic power of the bumiputra Malays, they had the reverse
effect — the Asian economic crisis in the late 1990s gave rise to large
numbers of unemployed public university graduates who were clearly at
a disadvantage in seeking employment in the private sector because they
lacked competence in English (Zaaba et al. 2013).
PPSMI lasted only a decade. With a lack of qualified teachers to carry
out lessons in English, especially in the rural schools, and mounting social
pressure to ensure greater economic and social opportunities for the
ethnic Malays, the Malaysian government announced that PPSMI would
be discontinued, and in its place, would be a new policy called MBMMBI
(Memartabatkan Bahasa Malaysia Memperkukuh Bahasa Inggeris), literally
translated as “to uphold Bahasa Malaysia and to strengthen the English
language”. The new policy was designed to be a compromise, switching
the medium of instruction for science and mathematics back to Malay, but
at the same time increasing curriculum time for the teaching of English up
to 40 per cent. Critically, MBMMBI would see the re-establishment of Malay
as the medium of instruction in schools, in alignment with its position as
the national language, would again endow Malay with the educational
and administrative capital that would ensure its position as a language
of higher status than English. By association, this would then provide the
Malays with linguistic capital and economic opportunities which would
afford them greater social and professional mobility.