KUALA LUMPUR: Barisan Nasional (BN) Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin today addressed MCA's fight to retain Chinese vernacular schools and assured the Chinese-party that their rights to their mother tongue education was respected.
He pointed out that Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak had settled the debate over the continued existence of vernacular schools in his 2015 budget speech yesterday by allocating RM50 million each to Chinese national-type schools and Tamil national-type schools.
"The last word has come from the prime minister, and he said he will give Sekolah Jenis Kebangsaan Cina an allocation.
"It means the Federal Government appreciates these vernacular schools," he said to rousing applause from the attendees at the 50th MCA Youth annual general assembly at Sunway Putra Hotel, here.
However, he cautioned that although the vernacular school system was here to stay, there was still the huge issue of racial polarisation that had to be solved.
Citing a fictitious example of Ahmad and Lim, who were both born in Malaysia but each followed a different language pathway. Khairy said Malaysia was facing a problem of too many “parallel lines”.
"Parallel lines will never meet forever, in Malaysia we have too many of these.
"We need to find a solution to bend these parallel lines so that we can see interaction between youths," he said.
Khairy also pointed out that it was easy for each race to fight for their own community but it was much tougher to fight for all races.
"We fight for all races because this is the right thing to do and that is what BN is about.
"We need to take the middle path that the prime minister is taking.
"Najib is brave enough to carve a path that not just satisfies one race. I ask that we all walk this middle path," he said.