built all over the Territory: a taste has sprung up for many foreign luxuries, and aerated waters, cigarettes, clothes, caps, towels and kerosene oil are now common objects of sale in the small market towns". The district officer also noted the villagers' openness to new ideas: "Contact with foreign ways has rendered the average villager less superstitious than of yore”: as an example of this openness to new ideas, he stressed the "suddenness and unanimity” with which the New Territories villagers accepted the 1911 Revolution: "all showed ... that they had long been ready to join the party of progress."
If, however, in the generation before 1911, there was already some openness to foreign ideas in the New Territories, the efforts by the Hong Kong Government to inculcate these new ideas formally through the schools were initially less successful. In 1902, the Brewin Committee recommended setting up government schools in the New Territories to teach village youths English and a modern curriculum. The first such school, at Yuen Long, was established in 1904, and schools at Tai Po and Cheung Chau followed in 1906 and 1909. However, in their first decade, these schools were unpopular with poor academic standards, and had little influence: in 1911 the three government schools only had 66 pupils between them, out of 3,085 pupils at school in the New Territories generally (2.1%). However, during the next decade the standards and acceptability of the government schools began to rise: in 1920 their combined enrolment reached 133. It was only after that date, however, that the government schools began to have any very marked effect.
In 1913 the village schools were brought within the ambit of the Education Ordinance. The Sung Report recommended paying a grant to those village schools of a better quality willing to include some modern teaching within their curricula. Initially 50 schools (out of the 260 existing) were chosen, and the scheme was begun in 1914. By 1916, however, only 11 of the aided schools were as yet able to teach a "modern curriculum". In 1918 a two-level grant scheme was introduced, and in 1919 a three-level scheme: this was designed to increase the number of schools eligible for a grant, and to increase the leverage of the government in introducing more modern subjects into the village schools. By 1921, however, there were still only 85 village schools which the government considered fit to receive any form of grant.