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tended to concentrate on the areas of the curriculum considered most important, which certainly included the English language. An almost universal feature of the private tuition business was the relatively high level of fees. Indeed, private coaching (and cramming) had become something of a racket. It had certainly become so prevalent by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century that official notifications and advertisements for teaching posts in government schools regularly included, as a matter of course and as a form of inducement, the formula "Private tuition is allowed by permission of the Director of Education." Mok's emphatic claim that his method could be, and should be, practised without recourse to a teacher was probably a very effective selling ploy which would have appealed to those who disliked paying high fees as well as those who suspected that neither the teaching ability nor the conscientiousness of private tutors was all that it should be.
In the preface Mok Man Cheung outlines briefly the nature of his "unique" pronunciation system, which, by utilizing the sounds normally associated by Cantonese with written Chinese characters so that they could mouth English words, would have appealed to the national pride of his fellow Chinese residents of Hong Kong. At the same time, however, he was prepared to compromise his Chinese-ness by arranging that “all Chinese characters given for pronunciation of English words are to be read from left to right". This attempt simultaneously to attract support from many sections of Hong Kong society—the increasingly influential radical Chinese, unsympathetic to the Imperial Government but insistently proud of their Chinese culture, the more pragmatic Chinese businessmen, the westernized Chinese, and even the colonial establishment—was good commercial practice. The preface also helps to emphasize a distinction between Mok Man Cheung's "higher valuations” and his “lower valuations”, in the sense that Gunnar Myrdal made of these concepts. According to the outward, open and rationalized “higher valuations” of Mok Man Cheung, Chinese readers and users of his book might find his inclusion of model letters "handy in their everyday business and social relations with their European friends." From the fact that the book contains not a single sample of an informal, friendly letter to a European, one might infer that Mok Man Cheung's
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tended to concentrate on the areas of the curriculum considered most important, which certainly included the English language. An almost universal feature of the private tuition business was the relatively high level of fees. Indeed, private coaching (and cram- ming) had become something of a racket. It had certainly become so prevalent by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century that official notifications and advertisements for teaching posts in government schools regularly included, as a matter of course and as a form of inducement, the formula "Private tuition is allowed by permission of the Director of Education." Mok's emphatic claim that his method could be, and should be, practised without recourse to a teacher was probably a very effective selling ploy which would have appealed to those who disliked paying high fees as well as those who suspected that neither the teaching ability nor the conscientiousness of private tutors was all that it should be.
In the preface Mok Man Cheung outlines briefly the nature of his "unique" pronunciation system, which, by utilizing the sounds normally associated by Cantonese with written Chinese characters so that they could mouth English words, would have appealed to the national pride of his fellow Chinese residents of Hong Kong. At the same time, however, he was prepared to com- promise his Chinese-ness by arranging that “all Chinese charac- ters given for pronunciation of English words are to be read from left to right". This attempt simultaneously to attract support from many sections of Hong Kong society the increasingly influen- tial radical Chinese, unsympathetic to the Imperial Government but insistently proud of their Chinese culture, the more pragmatic Chinese businessmen, the westernized Chinese, and even the colo- nial establishment · was good commercial practice. The preface also helps to emphasize a distinction between Mok Man Cheung's "higher valuations” and his “lower valuations”, in the sense that Gunnar Myrdal made of these concepts." According to the out- ward, open and rationalized “higher valuations” of Mok Man Cheung, Chinese readers and users of his book might find his inclusion of model letters "handy in their everyday business and social relations with their European friends." From the fact that the book contains not a single sample of an informal, friendly letter to a European, one might infer that Mok Man Cheung's
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