Hong Kong's education syllabus should not be enabling students to settle for less
Regina Ip says in seeking to level the playing field for all students, officials may have unnecessarily dumbed down the secondary school syllabus, as the exam results suggest
Ongoing problems in the implementation of Hong Kong's new secondary school curriculum are a classic illustration of the yawning gap between theory and practice, expectation and realisation.
At the dawn of the 21st century, education reformists embarked on the high-minded goals of enhancing the development of every individual in our society - and hence upward mobility - by introducing reforms aimed at enabling students with different academic abilities to develop their full potential. The Education Commission pledged that academic standards would not be sacrificed in the course of providing "equitable opportunities" for all.
If it is agreed that the basic skills with which every student should be equipped remain "the three Rs" (reading, writing and arithmetic) of 19th-century education theory, the proof of the pudding is in the academic performance of students who took the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education in 2012, 2013 and 2014 in the areas of language proficiency and maths.
A few years back, curriculum development officers in the Education Bureau decided that the study of classical Chinese texts was not relevant to modern Hong Kong society, and radically changed the approach in teaching and testing the Chinese language. It is now taught like a foreign language and students are tested on the ability to read, write, listen and speak Cantonese.
Students are no longer tested on prescribed classical Chinese texts. As the result, in the absence of the study of these and modern literary texts, students' ability to write Chinese characters and to use Chinese proverbs and idioms correctly has declined drastically. Chinese language, one of the four core subjects, became the most feared in the new curriculum, with only slightly over 50 per cent of the students taking the subject achieving at least level 3 in the 2014 examinations.
The decline in proficiency is apparently so worrying that the bureau is reinstating 12 classical Chinese texts in the syllabus from September, with a view to testing students on comprehension of these texts from 2018.
While the study of classical Chinese texts was blamed for encouraging memorisation and rote learning, the removal of this requirement has clearly not helped students to acquire a satisfactory level of proficiency in the use of the Chinese language, let alone their appreciation of Chinese culture.