Malaysia’s Globalization, Educational Language Policy and Nation-Building 41
serve as the overarching link between the multilingual primary schools.
It was hoped that this common content curriculum would help to bring
about a common process of enculturation among the students regardless
of medium of instruction (Federation of Malaya 1956).
The common language policy espoused by the Razak Report was
subsequently adopted by the 1960 Rahman Talib Report and enforced
through the 1961 Education Act (see Federation of Malaya 1960, 1961).
The immediate casualty of this common language policy was the Chinese
secondary schools managed by the Chinese educationists affiliated to the
United Chinese School Committees’ Association (UCSCA, or Dong Zong)
and the United Chinese School Teachers’ Association (UCSTA, or Jiao
Zong). These schools were required to switch to the national medium of
instruction in exchange for state funding (grants-in-aid) or else they would
have to exist as Independent Chinese Secondary Schools (ICSSs) or Duli
Zhongxue (Duzhong) outside the ambit of the national educational system.
In the end, out of the dire need for state funding, fifty-five of the existing
seventy-one Chinese secondary schools acted against the advice of the
Chinese educationists and decided to conform to state policy and became
the National-Type Chinese Secondary Schools (NTCSSs) or commonly
known as the conforming schools (Gaizhi Zhongxue) (Tay 2003; Tan 1988,
1997; Tan and Santhiram 2010).
The NTCSSs initially used English as the medium of instruction but
when a new educational policy was promulgated in the early 1970s, their
medium of instruction was switched to the Malay language in stages. This
switch of medium of instruction was supposed to come much earlier, i.e.
in 1967, when the status of English as an official language of the country
was reviewed ten years after independence as stipulated by the Federal
Constitution. This constitutional review was meant to elevate the Malay
language as the sole official language of the country to further consolidate
the common language policy advocated by the state. However, for some
reason, the Malaysian government had decided to retain the use of English
for official purposes in the enactment of the National Language Act, though
it had elevated the Malay language as the sole official language of the
country (Roff 1967; Haris 1983; Ibrahim 1986; von Vorys 1976).
The new educational policy promulgated by the government in the
early 1970s also enforced the conversion of other types of English-medium
schools (primary and secondary), namely the missionary English schools
and the government English schools, to Malay-medium schools to uphold