IMAGINE A SCHOOL where children are free to play all day and dress however they like, where they can dictate what they do and don't learn and where they even share decision-making powers with their teachers.
Such schools - known as free or democratic schools - exist, the first and most famous being A.S. Neill's Summerhill, in the small Suffolk town of Leiston in England.
The sight of carefree life at Summerhill would shock most Hong Kong principals and teachers. Children dressed in scruffy jeans and t-shirts swing from the Big Beech Tree or leap from the skateboard ramp when many would expect them to be testing their spelling or times tables in the classroom.
But formal classroom learning, the school's principal Zoe Readhead unashamedly admits, is not the most important part of life for her school's 90 pupils - about half of them from overseas including Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Play takes precedence.
For Ms Readhead, the freedom for children to be children in their own self-governing community and to discover for themselves who they are and where their true interests lie is at the heart of the school.
The self-government is most evident in its school meetings, when everyone, from the youngest child to the principal, has an equal vote. During the meetings laws are made and changed, and cases brought against anyone, child or adult, suspected of having fallen foul of them. 'Meetings govern our whole lives. They take precedence over everything else,' Ms Readhead said.