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A study on the Problems of "Education for the Multi-Ethnic Co-existence" in Malaysia

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Abstract In the multi-ethnic society, multicultural education is seemed as an effective settlement for the multi-ethnic co-existence. Of course, multicultural education (MCE) aims to improve the dominant one-c...ulture-oriented educational policies and systems. But, in practice, educationalists tend to change or widen such narrow ideas first. Thus, they take on a lot of time and energy to fulfill the first task, before they recognize the practical system improvement as a next task. I examine the problems of "Education for the Multi-Ethnic Co-existence (EMEC)" from two perspectives. One perspective is understanding/interpretation of "inner and outer" position, that is, Macro and Micro. When we study even the minority group, we should try to understand internal variety world in minority and also it's minor ethnic sub-groups' interrelation (outer world), as we perceive that the person has more than two worlds; philosophies or values. We habitually compare them and choose most reasonable and comfortable option in daily life. The other perspective is practical function. I classified the function of education into 3 dimensions. The first is economic-politics dimension of education, such as IT skill, global standard, compensatory education, modernization, social handicapped theory, etc. The second one is culture-politics dimension, such as each cultural heritage, national culture, national language, mother tongue, citizenship, national integration, localization/decentralization etc. The third one is human-social formative/reformative dimension; this is concerned in human-relation or interaction approach, such as adherent vs. innovative, authoritarianism vs. cooperative in teaching method, an acquired or habituated knowledge, tradition and development, modernization etc I studied the first dimension in former papers. In this paper, I treat the second dimension mainly. At that dimension, we will recognize a plural stratum structure of "one" culture even in the minority group. Bumiputera (son of soil)/Malay society includes "Orang-Asli" (indigenous people) under the flag of multiculturalism; "Orang-Asli" has been the discriminated indigenous group people from Malay society. Chinese Malaysian also has to face their dialect languages as mother tongue issues, not to the Standard Chinese (Mandarin). In the case of Indian Malaysian, why only Tamil language education has a right to teaching/learning in a school, irrespective of other language group; Sikhs, Telgus, Malayalis etc. Lastly, from the third dimension, I examined some textbooks of history and moral education in secondary level. In these textbooks, I couldn't find enough introduction and explanation of situation about such sub-minority groups. If the students, however, acquired some knowledge of the facts of their presence, the students must thinks on the base of this knowledge, and interact with groups, societies and the systems inevitably. The next task of this study is consequently to investigate the actual change in the recognition to other categories in the "multi-ethnic" image of teacher and student. Because EMEC and MCE should provide the balanced map of ethnic categories and support a proper and autonomous choice in the paradigm they live on.show more

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Created Date 2012.11.19
Modified Date 2021.03.03

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