Please have a heart, Education Ministry

THE nine-year-old girl in Sarawak who was stopped from attending school because of her citizenship status is just one of a large number of children in Malaysia who are being denied their basic right to education.

A conservative estimate suggests that more than 300,000 children in Malaysia are currently denied education because they are stateless, refugees, asylum seekers or do not have official documents to prove they are citizens of the country.

This denial of access to education is happening in the face of national policies that support education for all children in Malaysia regardless of their citizenship status. The policies are:

1. The National Education Policy (2017), which states that primary education is compulsory for all children aged six to 12 years, including non-citizens;

2. The Zero Reject Policy launched in 2018 to ensure that all children in the country, including undocumented children, will have access to education; and

3. Former Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin’s speech in conjunction with Teachers Day in May 2021, where he pledged that no student in Malaysia, including undocumented children, would be denied proper education.

So why are schools asking for citizenship documents before admitting children for basic education? Why do the large number of stateless individuals in Sabah and Sarawak continue to be denied the same rights as the rest of our children? Why are refugee children not given opportunities to learn even basic reading and writing skills?

Is this a problem of local “little Napoleons” or a backtracking of policy by the Education Ministry?

A recent analysis by Dr Tharani Loganathan and her colleagues at Universiti Malaya on the failure to provide education to such children is worth reading. It highlights all the issues and problems faced by refugees and asylum seekers, migrants and stateless persons in Malaysia.

We have Malaysians and the government actively fighting for the rights of Palestinian children 7,600km away but not for those in our own country. We need to fix this problem in our own backyard.

Poverty is a life-long trap that is very difficult to come out of and has devastating impacts on children and their families. We all know that education creates opportunities for children and families to come out of this “trap”. Denying these children education is effectively imprisoning them and their future generations in poverty. These children are not numbers or statistics but real lives that are damaged by our behaviour and response.

We therefore appeal to the Education Ministry to enforce our national policies and aspiration to provide quality education to every child in Malaysia.

Any nation that does not provide food, shelter, education and healthcare to ALL children as a basic right, regardless of their citizenship status, is a failed nation.

LETTER SIGNED BY 105 PROFESSIONALS/INDIVIDUALS AND REPRESENTATIVES OF NGOS AND CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANISATIONS