I refer to the debate on vernacular school role and the polarisation of races and would like to contribute my perspective on it. My parents sent me and my siblings was sent to national schools. My oldest brother and sister were in the last few batches in English-medium schools while the rest of us were under the Bahasa medium of instruction.

My cousins (two dozen of them) were sent to Chinese vernacular schools.

When you look at racial relations and my siblings, the reasons of polarisation become clear. My oldest brother and sister have very close Malay friends from their school days. Despite the fact that they live far apart, they invite each other over for weddings and birthdays besides celebrating the major holidays together.

The rest of us siblings have no close friends from our schooldays despite the fact that we went to national schools and had more Malay classmates. We have almost no such relationships even from the same neighbourhood.

We, however, regularly socialise and interact with our co-workers and professional colleagues but this is mostly out of obligation rather than out of personal affinity towards each other.

My cousins who all went to Chinese vernacular schools are much like us. In fact, I would argue that they interact more freely with the Malay friends because their Chinese language education has prevented them from competing directly with them.

Especially now that many from that generation pursue opportunities in China, they try even harder to keep in touch with Malay friends back home as they want to remain connected to their roots.

What I think our experience tell us is that even if vernacular school do no help to unite the races (and I believe my cousins' experience demonstrates that it does by allowing the better nature of people to prevail), it plays only a minor role in polarisation.

National schools students can be even more polarised by the forcing of the dark realities of human politics upon them too early in life. How do you tell a young child that he is limited in his scope of education because of his race?

The truth is that the ability of education to bring people together is limited. On top of that, education - at least secular one - is about the pursuit of truth and knowledge and hence, whatever is taught in schools should be based on the truth and reality in order to unite the students.

But when our society is already polarised by the law and other economic realities, and we tell our children otherwise in school, its likely that the unity lessons will never stick for long or even worse, result in a backlash.

My oldest brother and sister demonstrate that the old system of meritocracy brings about long lasting relationships which can even overcome the failures of government policies and social pressures.