My Take | Our children need to read more books, not fewer

Education chief Eddie Ng Hak-kim once bragged that he reads at least 30 books a month. That reminds me of a Woody Allen joke: “I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in 20 minutes. It was about Russia.” Does Ng even remember the titles?

Maybe he does have a genuine love of reading. But that would be hard to square with the Education Bureau’s latest decision to cut book subsidies ranging from HK$8,000 to HK$34,000 a year per local school. You would think encouraging young pupils to develop a love of reading would be something that every educator could agree on. Well, maybe not with our education bureaucrats.

The bureau first said the cut was part of a cost reduction plan at the request of the financial secretary. What? When the government is sitting on massive surpluses? I would hate to know what our government would do to us if it started incurring recurrent deficits.

Now, however, Ng said there was no subsidy cut, just a reallocation of resources, and that schools could find money to buy books from other subsidy schemes. That’s a fine example of bureaucratic obfuscation if ever there was one.

He said young people’s reading habits had changed significantly since the subsidies were first introduced. He also claimed most stakeholders had been consulted.