YEARS ago, a neighbour who was a police sergeant came over for tea and told my father and I that he was taking his son out of a national school and enrolling him in a Tamil vernacular school.

I told him that was a wrong move, because unity can only come if all Malaysians send their children to national schools, or at least missionary schools which also have the same syllabus and medium of instruction in Bahasa Malaysia.

The sergeant dismissed the idea of unity, and told me his reasons for pulling out his son from the national school. It was simple, he said, the class teacher had blamed his son’s lack of progress on his ethnicity. And also made fun of his “Indian body odour”.

“I might be a police sergeant and serve the country but the school practises a class and racist system. I don’t want my son to suffer,” the neighbour said.

“He is better off with his own kind, at least no one will mock us about body smell,” he added.

The conversation came back to mind this week when news broke that a national school in Hulu Langat was practising “cup apartheid” – labelling cups for Muslims and non-Muslims.

The reason given was as simple as this, the headmaster had cited “health” and some non-Muslim pupils’ practice of consuming non-halal food in the school.

The school has 214 Malay, 163 Indian, and five Chinese pupils, according to news reports. Of course, the entire incident caused an outrage and the school has now changed the labels by asking all students to just wash the cups thoroughly.

The Malaysian Insight visited the primary school in Taman Puteri in Hulu Langat on Friday and found the pupils largely unaffected by the change and certainly unaware of the anger and tension the labels had caused.

Asked why the cups were labelled, some pupils said they had no idea and were just obeying the rules.

From this, we know one thing. Children have no idea of racism. It is the adults who impart and institute such concepts on them. And from what we can see, latent racism starts from a young age.

Perhaps the phrase that the road to hell is paved with good intentions is true.

There exists a minority of school teachers who believe they are right in what they are doing – either blaming ethnicity for intelligence or body odour or labelling cups to prevent Muslim students from imbibing anything unclean by the standards of their faith.

Yet, there are better ways of doing this rather than mocking the students or putting labels. Science has revealed there is no such thing as race, and skin colour and other different physical traits are due to genetic factors.

And a faith like Islam does not recognise race. So why the need to mock people, to show piety by being concerned about separating cups and other utensils?

The government laments about national unity and spends millions on bringing people together, from national service camps to 1Malaysia events and now Transformasi Nasional 50 (TN50).

All well and good, but it is a bit late if the country tries to bring national unity at that late stage. School children are already exposed at a young age to racism and live in silos of going to different schools, including the rising number of private schools.

If Putrajaya wants to fix the problem, it needs to stamp it out from the beginning. And it can start in our primary schools. Otherwise, we will continue to hear of cup apartheid, of children being mocked for their ethnicity.

We need to be brought up as Malaysians from the earliest of age, and be proud that we are Malays, Indian, Chinese, Orang Asli, Kadazandusun, Bajau, Iban, Melanau and such.

But as Malaysians first, with mutual respect among our diverse cultures. – August 13, 2017.

* Jahabar Sadiq runs The Malaysian Insight.