Exactly 10 years ago today, this newspaper carried a story by a young reporter called Shirley Kwok. She looked forward a decade and imagined a Hong Kong where education had gone through big reforms and primary-school pupils 'all speak fluently with their teachers in both English and Putonghua'.
It was, as she wrote, a dream. A lot has changed since 1999 - Ms Kwok, for example, now works for me. But despite a lot of work and reform, our education system still falls short of what we think we need. We still worry that Hong Kong is losing competitiveness because of young people's weak language and critical-thinking skills.
Education reforms take years to have an effect. A new academic structure for senior secondary level will be introduced this September; full results will be seen when the first students graduate from four-year degree courses after 2015. The mother-tongue teaching policy introduced 10 years ago was controversial. But we can now see that children learn more when they are taught in a language they can actually speak.
The recent proposal to fine-tune the medium of instruction policy aims to allow greater use of English where teachers and students can handle it. But it also reflects a major problem caused by the labelling of schools as English- or Chinese-medium. To market themselves to status-conscious parents, many schools want the former label.
Although Hong Kong people are very sensitive about such labels on schools, it seems they could be paying far more attention to the quality - rather than language - of the teaching that goes on inside them.
In international surveys, Hong Kong students rank with those in Japan and South Korea around the top in mathematics and science, while they are weaker when it comes to language (Finland is first). This probably reflects the East Asian emphasis on rote learning; whatever the reason, it is not a bad thing to have highly numerate young people coming out of our schools.
We seem to take this success for granted. But many of us, especially politicians and those in the business community, are less happy about our students' creative thinking and communication skills. Perhaps we worry about poor English more than we did 10 years ago.