Students to refrain from bringing or consuming food with beef and pork contents to/in school

Dear Parent/Guardian,

In our effort to instill, inculcate and nuture values of mutual respect and harmony among our multiracial students, the school is making a request that students refrain from bringing or consuming food with beef and pork contents to/in school.

The school canteen too does not serve food with beef or pork contents as directed by the Ministry of Education.

It is our hope that our students will learn to respect each other's religious, cultural and traditional practices and to be able to appreciate and be receptive of each other's differences and uniqueness.

With this measure in place, we believe a more conducive learning environment will materialise.

Thank you.

Yours sincerely,

on behalf of the Principal


A Letter from a Parent

Dear all,

Honestly I am not too sure about this.

If we want to be all inclusive, then school should be vegetarian as there are definitely vegetarian Buddhist amongst us.

I grew up in a mixed environment, a mission school where there are Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Taoism, Hindu, Sikh students and nobody take any offense to anything. We have to sing " Sons of St Andrew's, a voice is resounding etc" in school and everyone sung it with gusto, including my senior here, Ishak. And Ishak is still Ishak, correct?

The point I am driving at is that we must not bring religion or politics to school. We must not let the politics of the day creep into school. On a worst case, if Malaysia heads in this direction, then we should have two sets of Ringgit, if you know what I mean.

Our children will have to face the real world out there, competing with every other country/race out there and there are 7 billion of us now. We must prepare them to be amongst the best in the world and compete and yes teach them to respect all the different cultures in the world and the do's and don't's.

By writing the above, I am not saying that my children will bring meat products to school (I would like to respect all religions), but I don't like this restriction by MOE as every human being has his or her own space.

MOE should not be focusing on such issues but on how to make our children the best in the world without studying until they drop. Our education quality is dropping by the day and we are talking about food!

I rest my case.

And as I think of it, I didn't hear such kind of issues when Datuk Ahamad Sipon was the DG of MOE!
He was my senior in St Andrew's and we are proud of his achievement.

Where is 1Malaysia in MOE? If the students bring their own food, container + utensils, what is wrong?

Can we imagine if I am a vegetarian by religion and I visit a festival of whatever religion and I insist that the host do not serve any meat nor eggs!

I am truly saddened by this whole episode!