elow are school text book lists for the year 1933 and the
year 2001. They represent two vastly different worlds -
historically, politically, socioculturally. Two different
centuries, two different systems of administration, two visions,
two world views. But the same school - the V. I.!
Now flashback to 1933, to the days of the worldwide slump and the British Empire at its zenith. King George the Fifth was on the throne and ruling over Malaya was his representative, the Governor, Sir Cecil Clementi. And presiding over the microcosm that was the 1933 world of the V.I. was the Headmaster, the suave Mr Frederick Lloyd Shaw, who had taken over the helm three years earlier from Mr G. C. Davies. White coated prefects prowled the V.I. corridors looking for errant pupils. Victorians sang God save the King at official functions and V.I. scouts saluted the Union Jack.
The 1933 book list would have been issued to the boys the previous December before school broke up for the long holidays. Using the list to buy textbooks for their respective classes would have been schoolboys like Yaacob bin Latiff (later a Tan Sri and future Mayor of Kuala Lumpur), Hector Jesudason (future Queen's Scholar of 1934), Fred Arulanandom (future judge), Ong Yoke Lin (later to become Tun Omar Ong, a Minister of Health and the President of the Dewan Negara) and hundreds of their schoolmates. What sort of subjects did they study in the V.I. of 1933 and why?
The policy of the prewar years in the Federated Malay States was to produce school leavers with a knowledge of the three R's, including a command of English - grammatically correct, idiomatic English, garnished with a light dash of the classics - and the more of it the better so that its local speakers and writers could fill the lower echelons of the colonial administation. An interesting 1910 statistic shows that the V.I. at that time was serving a major role in providing English education: its 423 boys represented 25 per cent of the total F.M.S. English school enrolment. (By 1933, with even greater demand, the total enrolment in English schools had ballooned tenfold.)
So English - with its attendant grammar drills, essays, dictation, poetry, debates, stories from the classics and plays from Shakespeare - was the order of the day. History and geography were predominantly Anglocentric in emphasis, as it was important to know a lot about Britain and its history if one was going to work for the government. Still, if one worked hard (and which V.I. boy didn't?), at the end of it all came the reward, a School Certificate awarded by Cambridge University, no less, a piece of paper that just about guaranteed one's rice bowl for life, if not in government service, at least in commerce. And not forgetting the added prestige and social mobility that came with an English education.
Although science titles are conspicuously missing from the 1933 book list, science was actually taught in the V.I. at that time. The problem was that there were no textbooks available for tropical schools as yet. So the science master, Mr F. Daniel, who had introduced science education at the V.I. three years earlier, passed out his own notes in loose-leaf form. (From this embryonic collection was to arise, in the 1940s, Daniel's famous set of Malayan science textbooks, which were used in the V.I. until the early sixties.) Hygiene, on the other hand, was easily taught (no labs were needed) and textbooks were available. It was also deemed an important subject as diseases like T.B., smallpox, hookworm, were prevalent in those prewar days and immediate postwar days and there was widespread ignorance of sound hygienic practice among the populace.
After the war, science spun off into four component subjects in the fifties - General Science, Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Pure science stream classes were set up in Form 4 and Form 5 to teach the last three subjects in lieu of General Science. The science stream boys were also taught a brand new mathematical subject as well - Additional Mathematics. These subjects are still being taught to this day.
If there was a second language taught to V.I. boys in addition to English in 1933, it certainly wasn't Malay, Chinese or Tamil! It was Latin, and even then it was taught only to select boys. (The study of Latin continued beyond the School Certificate classes into the Matriculation classes which prepared an elite group of Victorians for entry to British Universities as a prerequisite for acceptance to Oxford or Cambridge was either Latin or Greek.)
After the war, Latin was discarded but French was briefly taught in the V.I. in the mid-fifties but only after school hours to whichever boys were interested. (A handful of brave Victorians actually offered that subject in the Cambridge examinations after only two years of study.) Vernacular classes were arranged after school for those who wanted instruction in Chinese and Tamil. As independence approached, another language now came into prominence - Malay.
The language - then called Bahasa Kebangsaan - was offered to V.I. pupils, first as an optional subject in 1957 but it became a compulsory subject from 1959 onwards. Candidates who took and passed this subject in parallel with their Cambridge School Certificate were awarded the local Federation of Malaya Certificate. The FMC was abolished in 1964 and replaced by the Malayan Certificate of Education (MCE) and the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM). The Cambridge School Certificate itself was finally abolished in Peninsular Malaysia in 1968.
With Merdeka, national policy changes came thick and fast and, over the years to the present, the educational landscape has been resculpted fairly often with new initiatives. A year before Merdeka, in 1956, a major educational milestone was already marked by the introduction of the Lower Certificate of Education (LCE) examination. This gave Third Formers an academic qualification to fall back on if they failed to make it on to Form Five. The LCE morphed into the Sijil Pelajaran Rendah (SRP) in 1967 and this, in turn, was replaced by the Penilaian Menengah Rendah (PMR) in 1993. Hence the presence of that acronym - PMR - in some of the Form 2 and Form 3 titles in the 2001 V.I. book list.
In 1970, Malay replaced English as the medium of instruction in Standard One, and this progressed through the system until, by 1982, the entire corpus of instruction was in Malay. English, however, remained an important second language. There was a review of national education policy in the late seventies and one of the recommendations was a revamp of the curriculum for both primary and secondary schools to better prepare a skilled work force for the nation in the short and long term as well as to foster national unity.
In 1983, beginning with Standard One classes, the Kurikulum Baru Sekolah Rendah (Primary School New Curriculum) was implemented. In 1989, the Kurikulum Bersepadu Sekolah Menengah (KBSM) kicked in for V.I.'s pioneer batch of Form One pupils and worked its way through the secondary system over the years. And new subjects have been introduced to reflect the different priorities of the nation like Integrated Life Skills (1991) and Moral Education (1993). And that is why, as evidenced in the 2001 list below, many of today's V.I. textbook titles incorporate that all-important qualifier - KBSM!
Now flash-forward to the year 2001 in the twenty-first century. The country is now Malaysia and not the Federated Malay States. The British Empire has long vanished and its successor, the Commonwealth of Nations, is headed by King George the Fifth's granddaughter. Malaysia now has its own King and its own Prime Minister. Presiding over the microcosm that is the 2001 world of the V.I. is the Headmaster, Tuan Haji Baharom bin Kamari, who took over the helm two years ago from Puan Salha bt. Othman, the School's second Headmistress. White coated prefects still prowl the V.I. corridors looking for errant pupils. Victorians now sing Negaraku at official functions and V.I. scouts salute the Jalur Gemilang instead.
The V.I., while it has not physically moved, is not even in Selangor any more; it is now in Wilayah Persekutuan, a 94 square mile enclave carved out of Selangor by legislation in 1974. In addition, girls now attend the V.I. as well. And Victorians do not necessarily leave school after Form Five; there are two more years of Form Six to pursue if they are so inclined, the SPM no longer the passport to job security as its 1933 predecessor once was. And while V.I. pupils of 2001 still imbibe knowledge within the same classroom walls that their forefathers once sat, their separate sets of textbooks, 68 years apart, have many interesting tales to tell - if they could speak!
[Before World War Two, primary schools consisted of Primary 1 and Primary 2, followed by Standards 1 to 5 - seven years in all. Thus, on joining a secondary school like the V.I., a boy would be entering Standard 6 which is the equivalent of today's Form 2 (Tingkatan 2). And so the book lists below begin with Standard 6/Form 2 and not Form 1.]
