Singapore's Last Malay Schools

Salaam Dear Reader,

More than three years in the making, and with over 70 hours of interviews with former students and teachers spread across Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore, Sang Nila Utama & Tun Seri Lanang: Singapore’s Last Malay Schools is an important work that documents a slice of Malay history in independence-era Singapore as well as the history of education in our nation-state.

Confronted with an inexplicable paucity of official records on the schools, the repurposing of the buildings of the Tun Seri Lanang Secondary School for the Goodman Arts Centre, and the demolishment of Sang Nila Utama Secondary School in 2014, the author Hidayah Amin has had to construct the story of these historic schools brick by brick. Were it not for the efforts and recollections (and photos!) of the schools' surviving principals, teachers, and devoted alumni, there would hardly be any record of these schools.

Dear inquiring reader, you might justifiably ask, "Why are these schools different? Are not schools in Singapore closed, merged, and repurposed every year?"

Well, to start with, under the roughly century and a half of British rule of this island, children who went to Malay schools could progress no higher than primary school. There were many calls for education reform led by the likes of Eunos Abdullah and other figures, but ultimately, a real shift in educational policy with regards to Malay language education occured during the Merdeka period (the mid 1950s to the mid 1960s) when provisions were made for secondary Malay-stream education. The founding of Sang Nila Utama and Tun Seri Lanang secondary schools represented the culmination of a very long and hard-fought struggle.

So to understand the importance of these schools, this newly published work explains the context, the lived realities of the students and teachers, their pioneering innovations, what they achieved in those few years, and the quiet yet abiding impact they have had in their own ways.

We have to remember that it is our responsibility as inheritors of culture to have knowledge of matters in our history.

The closure of these schools remains a raw nerve for those who care deeply about the development of the Malay language in this country. Others might look away and point out how far we have come. However one looks at it, these schools still matter; even to those who never went to the schools. They matter because they represent our cultural aspiration and actualisation. And this is important to our identity as we surge forward in a new multicultural context.

Identity does not take shape in a vacuum and so a tangible record — absent the actual buildings — in the form of this book plays a role in anchoring, and in coming to terms with, wider questions about our present cultural identity.

We have to remember that it is our responsibility as inheritors of culture to have knowledge of matters in our history. Otherwise we risk allowing — to paraphrase Orwell in his novel 1984 — the past to be erased, and then to forget the erasure. 

May we be among those who remember.

Click here to purchase a copy.