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private primary schools which receive re- current financial aid from the govern- ment. Outside this free sector 19 per cent of primary age pupils attend private fee paying schools, and all kindergartens and secondary schools charge fees.
Because of the characteristics of the edu- cational system some 26-33,000 children aged between 12 and 14 are forced out of school and on to the labour market each year. Accordingly, in 1974 a White Paper on education set out the Govern- ment's plans for the next 10 years. The objective is to provide for every child, by 1979, 9 years' subsidised education. comprising 6 years in a primary school followed by 3 years of secondary educa- tion for children aged 12 to 14. The Government also hopes to provide suffi- cient subsidised places for 40 per cent of the 15 to 16 age group. These targets, however, " can only be attained if there is the fullest co-operation from private schools and agencies (Hong Kong 1975).
This reliance on the private sector not only puts the Government's educational plans at risk but also provides the opera- tors of these schools-some of them of a very dubious nature with a guaran- teed source of income as the Government
buys places in them. A dependence upon the private sector of education be- came established in the post-war years as the Colony's child population went up by leaps and bounds. This policy, born of a desperate situation, has, however, con- tinued to be the prevailing pattern long after the emergency has ceased. In spite of budget surpluses in every year except three since 1945, and an expansion in government revenue from HK$309 mil- lion in 1951-2 to HK$5,241 million in 1973-4, the provision of education has been incredibly slow, permitting much of its development to be in the hands of private speculators, as if children were plots of land or pieces of property. In- deed, in Hong Kong certain aspects of education fall quite easily into the cate- gory of Big Business. Some private schools registered with the Department of Education have been known to ask for public money to combat rising costs so as
to preserve their profit margins. Every July, with almost monotonous regularity, many private schools, most of them pri- mary, close their doors because their pro- fits are dwindling, while in September others take their place. In 1969, 93 private schools closed. Between January and September 1970, 40 private schools (in- cluding twenty secondary) closed because of financial difficulties, while 120 new private schools had been registered. The Government was elated because this meant a net gain of 10,000 school places! But this number was much reduced by the end of 1970 as in November the closure of sixty more private schools was reported (South China Morning Post, 11 November 1970). Many of the closures occurred because of spiralling rents and the consequent squeezing of profit mar- gins. The education of one in every five primary school pupils therefore rests upon the haphazard functioning of market forces. For younger and older pupils the dependence is even greater.
In March 1975 there were 151,456 chil- dren between the ages three to six attend- ing kindergartens, all of them in the pri- vate sector as the government makes no provision for this age group. There were 694,570 pupils in primary schools, of whom 126,850 were in private schools. And in secondary schools there were 389,089 pupils, of whom 282,314 were in private schools. That is, 72 per cent of secondary education depends upon the buildings and staff of the private sector.
The Government relies so heavily on the private sector because education thereby costs the tax payer less. This, rather than the quality of education provided for children, has been its main consideration. A further illustration of this is provided by the parsimonious attitude it has adopted towards the supply of trained teachers. While the number of university graduates with professional teaching qualifications between 1959 and 1969 in- creased by 50 per cent (from 1,464 to 2,420), the number of untrained univer- sity graduates who were teaching in- creased by 84 per cent (from 2,899 to 5,338): one third of all primary school teachers and two thirds of all secondary
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