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The Hong Kong Education System
Chapter 2
Characteristics of the Education System
This chapter identifies and briefly describes those features
of Hong Kong education which have given the system its characteristic
shape and direction. These will be more clearly seen against a brief
background sketch of the development of primary and secondary education.
since the end of World War II.
2.2
When the war ended in 1945, school enrolment was
under 50,000. School buildings lay in ruins, equipment had been
destroyed, textbooks were almost non-existent and there was a serious
shortage of trained teachers. The process of rehabilitating the school
system was laborious and difficult. The enormous growth of the school
system since then (it now caters for about 1.4 million pupils) began in
1949, when immigrants from China began to arrive in tens of thousands.
With a predominantly young and rapidly growing population it was clear
that a massive school building programme was called for and that the
foremost priority was the development of primary education and teacher
training. Extensive government building programmes were launched in
the 1950s: at their peak about 45,000 primary school places were being
added each year. In 1965 the White Paper Education Policy announced
the reorganisation of the structure of primary and secondary education,
set universal primary education as the immediate aim and established
the principle that expansion of school education would henceforth be
through the aided sector wherever possible.
2.3
There was considerable consolidation and enhancement of
educational provision in the 1960s and early 1970s: for example, improved
programmes of teacher education were introduced in the colleges of
education, with the restructuring of initial training courses and their