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A Brief History of Technical Education in Hong Kong
notes. 'If they write things down they remember them', I was told. Even Professor F S Drake, an Englishman heading the Chinese Department at Hong Kong University who lectured in the medium of Mandarin, sang the praises to me of rote learning in a Chinese environment.
On a visit to a building site in January 1955 in So Kon Po, to which some of our students were attached for on-the-job training, I found that craftsmen were being paid $5.00 a day and women labourers $1.50. Some of the latter were straightening nails which had been knocked out of dismantled formwork (used for the pouring of concrete) so that the nails could be re-used. This practice stopped a few years later when it became cheaper to buy new nails. While talking of money, our full-time students could expect, on average, a salary of $300.00 a month in the mid 1950s after a three-year, full-time, post-secondary course, when they took up their first jobs.
There was also a clause written into the Government Public Works Department standard specification saying that if any of our building graduates could not find employment at the end of their course, main contractors were forced to take on two trainees on each major site. Their salary was $150.00 a month.
Still on the subject of money: one evening student used to walk home from the College in Wood Road to Sau Kei Wan, after class, in order to save his 10 cents second-class tram fare. In those days second-class was on the lower deck.
Continuing with another subject: with Hong Kong's population increasing post-World War Two at about one million per decade (in the mid 1950s it stood at around two-and-a-half million), coupled with rising standards of prosperity, impetus was given to the further development of technical education. As early as 1953, the Technical Education Investigating Committee (which
217
A Brief History of Technical Education in Hong Kong
notes. 'If they write things down they remember them', I was told. Even Professor F S Drake, an Englishman heading the Chinese Department at
Hong Kong University who lectured in the medium of Mandarin, sang the praises to me of rote learning in a Chinese environment.
On a visit to a building site in January 1955 in So Kon Po, to which some
of our students were attached for on-the-job training, I found that craftsmen were being paid $5.00 a day and women labourers $1.50. Some of the latter were straightening nails which had been knocked out of dismantled formwork (used for the pouring of concrete) so that the nails could be re-used. This practice stopped a few years later when it became cheaper to buy new nails. While talking of
money, our full-time students could expect, on average, a salary of $300.00 a
month in the mid 1950s after a three-year, full-time, post secondary course, when they took up their first jobs.
There was also a clause written into the Government Public Works
Department standard specification saying that if any of our building graduates could not find employment at the end of their course, main contractors were forced to take on two trainees on each major site. Their salary was $150,00 a
month.
Still on the subject of money: one evening student used to walk home from the College in Wood Road to Sau Kei Wan, after class, in order to save his 10 cents second class tram fare. In those days second-class was on the lower
deck.
Continuing with another subject: with Hong Kong's population increasing post-World War Two at about one-million per decade (in the mid 1950s it stood at around two-and-a-half million), coupled with rising standards of prosperity, impetus was given to the further development of technical education. As early as 1953, the Technical Education Investigating Committee (which
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