'The college offers its pupils a wide variety of extra-curricular activities covering, among other things, community service, physical recreation and the liberal arts, thus ensuring that its pupils come out into the community well equipped to play their full part in its development.'
So said the late David Trench, governor of Hong Kong, in a congratulatory note on the 20th anniversary of New Method College, then the territory's largest Anglo-Chinese private school.
A month after that note was penned, on February 2, 1971, the governor unveiled the school's fourth premises, on Man Fuk Road, near the junction of Waterloo Road and Argyle Street, in Kowloon. The new campus joined ones on Caroline Hill-Link Road, Tai Hang Road and Prince Edward Road, all on prime real estate, then and now. New Method was at the time welcoming a record intake of 17,500 students a year.
Four decades on, the Man Fuk campus stands alone and empty, the surviving block soon to be rented out to another school before being demolished, when property prices are more favourable.
The last New Method students - 300 Form Seven pupils - bade farewell to each other on March 9. They were the last beneficiaries of an institution that, for six decades, had distinguished itself by pursuing an all-round liberal education rather than academic excellence. The wide variety of professions among its alumni - from space scientist to legislators - testifies to the fact that 'new method' was more than just a name.
'I find it very funny when I read in the news about the government offering land and resources for new schools to become international, engage in extra-curricular activities and give a general education,' says Wilfred Wong Ying-wai, a graduate of the class of 1970. 'That's exactly what New Method College did half a century ago, and I owe my career to my 10 years there.'
Wong chairs the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, the Council of Baptist University and a dozen other bodies. He attributes the school's character and success to Wilson Wang Tze-sam, who founded a tutorial school in 1949, two years before the name New Method College was registered, with vision that was far ahead of his time.