ABSTRACT
Having been exceptionally strong from the 1970s to the Asian crisis of 1997, Malaysian growth has remained generally intense and robust since then: the country can contend for the rank of developed country in 2020. Poverty has in the meantime considerably decreased, and social mobility between the 1970s and the present has been significant. But in contrast, the education of Malaysians seems mediocre, the result of a system regarded as weak, relatively perverse and largely blocked. Moreover – and this was still noticeable during the ceremonies celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of independence on 31 August 2017 – while the country purports to share a collective sentiment of national pride, its educational system has been marked by three decades of massive discrimination in favour of the bumiputra (‘sons of the soil’), to support and benefit the Malay majority population to the detriment of the other communities that make up this plural Southeast Asian society.
