ENG-1983 — Page 10

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Window

Education at the Crossroads

APART from the future of the territory, few public issues elicited such widespread interest in Hong Kong during 1983 as education. The year saw the final stage of a process which had begun in 1980 with a government decision that an overall review of the education system should be undertaken by an independent Panel of Visitors, chosen on the advice of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for their wide collective experience of different education systems.

The panel of four - the 'four wise men' as they came to be known - had been given a very broad brief which required them to identify the future aims of the education system, to consider the coherence and effectiveness of the existing service, to identify areas which might require strengthening and to make recommendations on priorities in the further development of the education system.

The initial suggestion that an overall review should be carried out was made by the Board of Education, the oldest-established of the government's three main advisory bodies on education. The decision to launch such a review reflected the government's belief that no statement of policy should seek to impose a fixed pattern on future development. Education policy must be subject to a continuous process of review and be receptive to new ideas. Education policy had undergone successive stages of development since World War II. While there had undoubtedly been major educational advances - in particular, the recent achievement of nine years' free and compulsory education for the vast majority of the six to 14 age groups, together with greatly improved opportunities for higher age groups - it was felt that progress had been piecemeal, much of it in response to specific social and economic pressure. The time had come for an overview. This would begin by taking stock of what had been achieved in primary and secondary education over the previous 30 years or so.

Post-war Problems and Progress

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When World War II ended in 1945, school enrolment in Hong Kong was under 50 000. School buildings lay in ruins, equipment had been destroyed, textbooks were almost non-existent and there was a serious shortage of trained teachers. The process of rehabilitating the school system was laborious and difficult. The enormous growth of the school system since then (it now caters for about 1.3 million pupils) began in 1949, when immigrants from China began to arrive in tens of thousands. With a predominantly young and rapidly growing population it was clear that a massive school building programme was called for and that the foremost priority was the development of primary education and teacher training. Extensive government building programmes were launched in the 1950s: at their peak about 45 000 primary school places were being added each year. In 1965 the White Paper Education Policy announced the reorganisation of the structure of primary and secondary education, set universal primary education as the immediate aim and