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and traditional primers and classics were taught with emphasis on memorization, recognition of characters, and calligraphy. After 1921, simple readers known as Kwok Man E Readers, revised versions of the Yu-hsueh ch'iung-lin and a reformed set of three-four-five-character primers written for women and children began to be, very tentatively, introduced into these classes. In the subsidized and registered schools, a wider curriculum including reading, arithmetic, history and geography was adopted. Yet, according to the official reports of the inspectors of these schools, even the subsidized classes with their wider curriculum failed in fact to provide a modern basic general education as desired. The 1921 report remarks with respect to schools of this type in the New Territories in general:26
Little or no explanation of reading matter is given; the main idea being to memorize as much as possible. Pupils in their second year could not, with any degree of certainty, explain the meaning of simple characters as sky, heaven, day, sun; the matter seemed to be understood by those who were naturally intelligent, who at inspections were generally pushed forward.
Boys of the poorer class do not receive anything approaching a useful education. They spend 3 or 4 years at school, and leave school to take up, in many instances, some menial position, and their only asset is an ability to recite a hundred pages or so from the Classics practically meaningless to them.
The few subsidized schools at Sheung Shui belonged to category C and received an annual subsidy varying from $45 to $60 per annum only. Therefore, the income of a subsidized school teacher was, even taking into account school fees, only about $12 per month.27 In the non-subsidized schools, it was even lower. Although the normal school fees were supplemented by gifts in kind from students at festivals, most teachers had to work as clerks to the villagers for extra income.28 The price of rice was between $12 and $14 per picul and the monthly salary of a government clerk was then $30 to $40. This explains why there was a marked shortage of teachers. A number of teachers were brought from
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