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and often served as village leaders or became appointed officially as village representatives, enjoying perhaps as high a social prestige as had once been accorded to the civil examination degree-holders in imperial China.
We have seen that, from about 1912 or 1913, some girls in the village began to be educated, and some boys began to seek a fully modern education outside the village. Adjustments were also made in the education available to the majority of the villagers who stayed and received their education in the village. But the changes were slow to come and were not without difficulties. Between 1913 and 1932, of the fifty to a hundred government subsidized schools in the New Territories, three at the most were from Sheung Shui and they had more than once been struck off from the subsidized school list because of unsatisfactory progress.
When the Education Ordinance of 1913 was applied to the New Territories in 1921, at different times only between one and a maximum of three schools in Sheung Shui were accepted for registration. With an average attendance of about 20 students each, this small number of subsidized and registered schools accounted for only between 20 and, at most, 100 students, and probably averaged about 40. This meant that a great part of the village education at this time was operated outside approved channels, and was not subject to the supervision of the Hong Kong government, and since even the supervised schools were occasionally struck off for poor standards, it may be assumed that the average school had not received much advantage from the modern education ideas, modern textbooks and new teaching methods. School education remained basically still in the impoverished traditional form described above as typifying village education in the first decade of the century. Meanwhile, it seems unlikely that school attendance had dropped drastically, and it is therefore unlikely that more than a third of the school-going children in the village were being educated in these subsidized schools. According to accounts given by elders who had taught or studied in the village during these years, traditional small tutorial classes were carried out as before. But only the one, two or three larger and better such classes were able to secure any subsidy from the government. In these tutorial classes the curriculum remained basically as narrow as before,