Different school streams are not the problem. What we teach is.

Whenever Malaysians discuss ethnicity, education almost always enters the conversation.

Chinese primary schools, national schools, Tamil primary schools and Chinese independent high schools are named. Before long, someone argues that people who do not study together as children will naturally grow into separate social circles.

I used to think that explanation contained at least some truth.

But after watching many political speeches and online commentaries over the past two months, I have started to think the problem is not so simple.

What unsettles me most is not that Malaysians attended different schools.

It is that many adults, including people who already vote, still return to ethnicity as the first way to understand an issue.

Is this policy good for Chinese Malaysians?

What will Malay Malaysians think?

Is this another case of unfairness toward one community?

Sometimes a problem caused by one person can quickly become a problem attributed to an entire community.

That makes me wonder whether our education has ever fully taught us what citizenship means.

Of course, schools do teach parts of it.

Children learn about the festivals of different communities. They learn the Rukun Negara, mutual respect and the fact that Malaysia is a multicultural country.

The problem is that much of the learning seems to stop there.

Children know Hari Raya, Chinese New Year and Deepavali. They know that everyone should live harmoniously.

What comes next?

At fifteen or sixteen, young people begin forming their own values. They spend far more time on TikTok and YouTube. They encounter politics, religion, ethnicity and policy, and they hear people telling them who is taking something away from them.

Do we continue teaching them at the moment they need civic education most?

Citizenship is not merely knowing that the country has several major communities.

It should first help a person understand who they are.

As a Chinese Malaysian, I can understand my culture, language and history, and know the rights I hold in this country.

Malay, Indian and other Malaysians should be able to do the same.

I do not believe a good Malaysian education needs to erase these identities.

But after knowing who we are, there is another step.

We need to understand that other people also have cultures, concerns and rights of their own.

I can speak for my educational rights while understanding why another community wants to preserve its culture.

I can challenge unfair treatment toward myself. If someone else is treated unfairly, I should not dismiss it because they are not one of us.

At that point, the question is no longer which community loses.

The question is whether this country allows unfairness to stand.

To me, this is the hardest and most important part of civic education.

There is another layer beyond it.

We do not only possess separate cultures. After living together for so long, we have also created things that belong to all of us.

Those things are difficult to call exclusively Chinese or Malay.

They are Malaysian.

In an earlier essay I called this process co-becoming.

Education should help the next generation understand it. You can know clearly where you come from while feeling that what we created together also belongs to you.

There is no contradiction in that.

I am Chinese. I am also a Chinese Malaysian.

I preserve my own culture and protect the Malaysian culture we have formed together.

A person who can hold these ideas naturally comes closer to what I mean by Malaysian.

Have we completed that work in education? I do not think we have.

The question has become more urgent now that Malaysians can vote from the age of eighteen.

A student can finish Form Five and become a voter soon afterwards.

We are willing to place a ballot in that person's hands. Before doing so, have we taught them how to assess a politician, judge a policy or distinguish between protecting communal rights and exploiting communal anxiety?

Much of that teaching has been left to social media.

That will inevitably create problems.

Form Six students encounter government, institutions and public affairs through Pengajian Am. Some of that thinking should begin earlier.

This does not mean moving the whole subject into secondary school or giving students another textbook to memorise.

It means allowing older secondary students to confront real questions.

What is fairness? Is the majority always right? How should minority rights be protected?

How do we judge a policy that benefits us but may be unfair to someone else?

How can we recognise a video that turns an individual's conduct into an ethnic accusation?

When a politician says they will protect us, do we know how to ask what exactly they are protecting?

These questions matter far more than memorising a few more dates.

That is why I no longer believe multiple school streams are Malaysia's biggest educational problem.

The kind of school a child attends certainly shapes their social circle, but many other things determine how they eventually see the country.

The most important may be whether we teach them to understand who we are after they know who they are.

If we fail at that, putting everyone in the same school will not make the problem disappear.

We may simply place everyone in the same classroom without teaching them how to become citizens together.

Malaysia is a complex country. We do not need to pretend our differences do not exist, nor turn everyone into the same kind of person.

Perhaps some things can be understood more simply.

I know who I am.

I know that you have the right to be yourself.

And together, we recognise that this country belongs to all of us.

If education cannot teach that well, the problem may not be which school stream the next generation attended.

The problem may be what kind of Malaysians we taught them to become.