42% or an estimated 10,000 tamil school pupils attending standard one at Tamil schools cannot read and write at all because they could not afford and therefore did not attend kindergarden (MO 10/3/10 at page 3).
This is despite the RM 48 million allocation for education in the 2010 Budget (NST and Star Headlines 24/10/09). But this RM 48 Million does not reach almost all of the 523 Tamil schools and so they do not have kindergardens.
To the contrary the One Malay-sian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s wife using the millions allocated just for Permata Kindergardens is introducing even graduate teachers from Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris for the thousands of almost all malay muslim Permata pre-schools.There are 5,900 places in 39 MSRM colleges and 6,000 places in fully residential schools (BH 17/1/2010 at page 16) – all for malays, 7,575 out of the 10,000 schools in the country are three to five star rating schools under the Smart school Qualification Standards (SSQS) with another 5% targeted to be increased by year end. (The Star 13/2/2010 at page N26).
But never mind if ten thousand of these Tamil school pupils cannot read and write.This is the official One – Malaysia Policy by Prime Minister Najib Razak!
P. Uthayakumar
