ABSTRACT
The introduction of modern education in British Malaya followed as a byproduct of colonial rule. Colonial administration carried in its wake considerable European investment in trade and primary industry along with a substantial influx of Chinese and Indian immigrants to the new towns, tin mines and rubber estates. If the indigenous Malay agricultural community lay largely outside these economic developments, they were at least due special political treatment by virtue of the principles of protectorate and indirect colonial rule upon which the British rationalised their presence in Malaya. Thus, even more than other instruments of colonial policy, education was obliged to give expression to Britain’s differential commitments to the Malays on one hand, and to alien Chinese and Indians on the other, while at the same time ensuring an adequate supply of educated manpower for government service and the commercial economy. The education systems that emerged during the colonial period reflected this divergence of goals between dif ferential communal commitments and manpower training, where ethnic pluralism was very largely coterminous with the dualistic pattern of economic development.
