EDUCATION AS A BYPRODUCT OF FISH MARKETING
139
Education and Science, though it has taken an interest, has so far postponed for ten years the fulfilment of promises to give written encouragement to local education authorities.**
49
There are some obvious reasons for these differences. The F.M.O. schools started some twenty years before the first projects for Gypsies, and the faintly remembered problems of their early years, of continuity, over-age pupils in inappropriate classes, all-age literacy teaching and so forth, were probably more similar to the problems of Gypsy education today than their present problems. There is a much greater drive to social assimilation of the Shui-sheung-yan than of the Gypsies, both in the community itself as well as from the government side. There is a greater availability of government resources in Hong Kong.
To understand these differences, however, we have to set the education policies in a more general policy context, to look at the overall policy problem that each pariah community seemed originally to present.
In the case of the Shui-sheung-yan in Hong Kong, it was an economic problem, the necessity, first of regenerating the fishing industry, then in the '50s and '60s of mechanising it, and finally in the '70s, of slimming it down. To carry this out a technologically literate workforce was needed, with appropriate social standing and honour in the community. So the start of an educational policy came swiftly on the heels of an economic policy: fish markets in 1945, schools in 1947. Finally in the 1950s, with the loans to the "Better Living Societies", came the beginnings of a housing policy to enable the Shui-sheung-yan to have the domestic culture consonant with their new economic and educational status.
In Britain a quite different chronology applied to the development of policy concerns. Once Gypsies were no longer being conscripted for military service or agricultural labour, as happened in the Second World War (and was promptly forgotten afterwards!) the initial policy concern was precisely with Gypsies' domestic culture. Gypsy caravan parked on rapidly diminishing amount of open land, giving rise to continuous protests by house-holders, increasingly brutal evictions by British police and council workers, and finally political resistance by Gypsies themselves, demanding places to camp. In 1968 the Caravan Sites Act was passed to try to produce an accommodation between Gypsies and house-dwellers, and on the heels of that came increasing concern for the education of Gypsy children, to further that accommodation (“so they
49
EDUCATION AS A BYPRODUCT OF FISH MARKETING
139
Education and Science, though it has taken an interest, has so far post- poned for ten years the fulfilment of promises to give written encour- agement to local education authorities. **
49
There are some obvious reasons for these differences. The F.M.O. schools started some twenty years before the first projects for Gypsies, and the faintly remembered problems of their early years, of continuity, over-age pupils in inappropriate classes, all-age literacy teaching and so forth, were probably more similar to the problems of Gypsy education today than their present problems. There is a much greater drive to social assimilation of the Shui-sheung-yan than of the Gypsies, both in the community itself as well as from the government side. There is a greater availability of government resources in Hong Kong.
To understand these differences, however, we have to set the education policies in a more general policy context, to look at the over- all policy problem that each pariah community seemed originally to present.
In the case of the Shui-sheung-yan in Hong Kong, it was an economic problem, the necessity, first of regenerating the fishing industry, then in the '50s and '60s of mechanising it, and finally in the '70s, of slimming it down. To carry this out a technologically literate workforce was needed, with appropriate social standing and honour in the community. So the start of an educational policy came swiftly on the heels of an economic policy: fish markets in 1945, schools in 1947. Finally in the 1950s, with the loans to the "Better Living Societies", came the beginnings of a housing policy to enable the Shui-sheung-yan to have the domestic culture consonant with their new economic and educational status.
In Britain a quite different chronology applied to the development of policy concerns. Once Gypsies were no longer being conscripted for military service or agricultural labour, as happened in the Second World War (and was promptly forgotten afterwards!) the inital policy concern was precisely with Gypsies' domestic culture. Gypsy caravan parked on rapidly diminishing amount of open land, giving rise to continuous protests by house-holders, increasingly brutal evictions by British police and council workers, and finally political resistance by Gypsies them- selves, demanding places to camp. In 1968 the Caraven Sites Act was passed to try to produce an accommodation between Gypsies and house- dwellers, and on the heels of that came increasing concern for the education of Gypsy children, to further that accommodation (“so they
49
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