Bulletin Number Five 1985

expansion and improvement of its educational system has thereby become an urgent need, and the newly established Education Commission is now laying the groundwork for meeting it. This then should also be the right moment to review some of the important problems embedded in our educational system and to re-examine their cause, and that is what I now propose to do. To view these problems in perspective, let us first remind ourselves of some of the important events in the development of education in Hong Kong. During the first half of this century, we had, like China and most of the rest of the world, a 'six-four' system, that is, six years of secondary education followed by four years of university education; within the system school leavers would need to take only one examination upon graduation, after which they would either seek employment or pursue further studies. During the early fifties, the School Leaving Certificate Examinations were instituted, and Anglo- Chinese schools changed to five years plus a Sixth Form of two years, while the University of Hong Kong changed to three years, thus ushering in a more complicated 'five-two-three' system. In 1961 the six-year Chinese middle schools also changed to five years plus a Sixth Form of one year; soon thereafter three four-year Postsecondary Colleges combined to form The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a ‘five-one-four' system emerged. During the sixties and seventies when primary and secondary education further expanded, the Secondary School Entrance Examination (SSEE) and the Junior Secondary Education Assessment (JSEA) test along with corresponding arrangements for centrally allocating secondary school places were instituted. Thus the hitherto relatively simple educational system was step by step transformed into a rather more complicated pathway, with a number of barriers and sidetracks thrown across it. There are various reasons why such a complicated system came into being. For instance, the Secondary School Entrance Examination and the Junior Secondary Education Assessment test were obviously expediencies to deal with the shortage of secondary school places, and both led to considerable problems. Fortunately, as school places caught up with demand, the former was phased out and the abolition of the latter is now also only a matter of time. As for the problem of Sixth Form education which has now become the focal point of a controversy and the subject of many discussions, its very existence and its stubborn resistance to so many efforts for finding a solution over such a long time can probably be understood only in terms of a school tradition originated in the British system. While at present there seems to be ways which may give relief to the frustrations generated by the co-existence of the ‘five-one-four' and the ‘five-two-three' systems and also satisfy several interested parties, it would nevertheless probably take considerably longer and yet greater effort to arrive at a true and lasting solution to this problem, which has built up over so many years. Another anomaly in our educational system is the striking contrast between the fast expansion of the Anglo-Chinese schools and the stagnation and decline suffered by the Chinese Middle schools. In the fifties, both kinds of schools were in fact comparable in school and student numbers. However, during the following two to three decades nearly all the new schools founded and most of the existing schools which were expanded turned out to be Anglo-Chinese schools, so much so that today Chinese Middle schools account for only about one-eighth of the total school number and less than one-tenth of the total student number in the secondary education system. This anomaly is no doubt closely associated with the predominance of the English language in a cosmopolitan city like Hong Kong. However, it probably also does have much to do with the recruitment policy of the Civil Service and the actual process through which new schools are founded. This is indeed tragic, for no matter how much importance one may wish to attach to English, it is clearly wasteful of the student's effort for him to use a barely comprehended foreign language as the tool of study; and in any case there is really no conflict between teaching in the mother tongue and emphasizing the learning of English. This has already been forcefully pointed out by the Visiting Panel in their Report 'A Perspective on Education in Hong Kong'. Unfortunately, even though the great majority of those who have openly expressed their opinion are in agreement with this view, it is nevertheless unlikely that Government would go beyond encouraging and assisting individual schools to change to mother-tongue teaching and actually make this step mandatory: the worries have been that students might thereby lose the freedom of choice and lessen their contact with English. Such a cautious approach naturally has the virtue of being least likely to cause a reaction; on the other hand, one cannot help wondering whether it would really have any substantial impact on the present trend of downgrading mother-tongue teaching, and whether making Chinese Middle schools indistinguishable from Anglo-Chinese schools would in effect allow the problem meantime to become even more serious. At their root, the problems of Sixth Form NEWS 11