REVIEW
7
The plan firmly recommends a non-contributory insurance scheme. This is partly because such a scheme can be set up quickly, partly because it avoids the problems of funding and principally because a contributory scheme such as the one operated in the United Kingdom would not easily be accepted by Hong Kong people.
These proposals, which will bolster the social welfare service and give new hope to those who benefit from them, will cost the government something in the region of $775 million over five years.
Basically, social security means that the state guarantees that people can live secure in the knowledge that they and their children will be protected from the worst effects of adversity. In Hong Kong, there is no codified comprehensive system as in some European and Commonwealth countries. But, in addition to the social welfare services being developed to cater for those in want and for vulnerable groups, there are medical services which are practically free, an educational system which provides free primary education, and subsidised housing without parallel.
In practice, this amounts to a very extensive system of social security based on the principle of assistance to those in need and which affords a sound basis for future development.
Education-Higher and Better
Hong Kong, with nearly half its population under 19, is bursting at the seams with young people eager for schooling. For years, the authorities have been trying to cope with stresses imposed on an educational system that originated in less trau- matic times when the population was a third of its present size. They have had sub- stantial success in some areas. Shortages in the primary field have been eliminated and there is now a free place available for every child in that sector.
Nevertheless, the system has been based on the regrettable but inescapable assumption that there are fewer places in secondary schools than there are students wishing to fill them, and the Secondary School Entrance Examination casts a long shadow over the lives of primary school pupils.
School life is intensely competitive and the emphasis on examinations has pro- duced distortion in both curricula and teaching methods. Unhappily, this has also meant a concentration on narrow scholarship rather than broader human values.
There is the added problem that under Hong Kong's labour laws, children must not work in industry until they are 14.
Hong Kong's education services are already expanding. Taking, for example, the yardstick of expenditure alone, the budget for the financial year 1972-3 is for $519 million compared with the 1969-70 allocation of $370 million.
Now that free primary schooling is available for all, the government is deter- mined to improve the quality of education. It aims to increase the number of secondary school places and so reduce the stringency of the Secondary School Entrance Exami- nation.