three
I am grateful for your offer of co-operation
to distribute literature about Hong Kong to the teachers whose classes have seen the play. We shall be taking up this offer, and I am content to leave it to the teachers to judge for themselves whether the picture of Hong Kong presented by the play was a true one or not. However, I am under no illusion that a further lesson from teachers will go more than part of the way to repair the damage that has been done.
I should make it plain that I am not disputing the right of the Bowsprit Company to choose Hong Kong as a subject for one of their "Theatre in Education" programmes although I would have thought they showed very poor judge- ment in trying to present a subject as complex as social conditions in an Asian community to 10 year-old pupils in the UK. Far from objecting to classroom study of Hong Kong, we seek to encourage it in every way we can, and we would have been pleased to co-operate with the authors of the play had we been invited to do so. The fact that we were not consulted must lead me to believe that the authors had reasons for not wishing to present a balanced view of conditions in Hong Kong.
I believe that, however good its reputation in the past, the Bowsprit Company has on this occasion fallen a long way short of those high standards of impartiality and regard for truth for which education in this country has always been noted, and which Hong Kong, as a British territory, has been happy to adopt as its model.
I look forward to receiving the comments of your Board of Governors as soon as possible, and I hope that these will be in a form which will be suitable for publication in Hong Kong where both the Government and general public have expressed dismay at the evident bias and distortion of
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'Empire Made" and the accompanying Teachers' Notes.
I am sending copies of this letter to Mr. G. Hodson, of the ILEA, Mr. J.A.B. Stewart, Head of the Hong Kong and General Department of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, and the Chief Secretary of the Hong Kong Government.
STK/SVS
12 July 1977
Yours sincerely,
б
(S.T. Kida),
COMMISSIONER