By law, every child in Hong Kong must receive nine years of free and compulsory education up to the end of Form Three, or until he or she has turned 16.
In practice, about 90 per cent complete secondary education.
It has not always been so. At the turn of the 19th century, when Hong Kong was still a sleepy outpost of the British empire, the colonial government did not consider the full provision of education for the highly mobile Chinese population as desirable or necessary.
In 1904, the population was recorded as 361,206. In town, about 3,680 students were enrolled in English schools, while 4,660 attended the so-called vernacular schools that taught in Chinese.
The net cost to the government of educating them was $151,589, or just 1.83 per cent of total revenue. There were no figures for children attending traditional schools in the newly acquired New Territories.
The 1921 census reckoned there were 155,427 people between the ages of six and 18, including the floating population and those in the New Territories, and about 23 per cent were registered in schools.
Reflecting the gender bias at that time, most boys, but not girls, were sent to school by their parents. Most went to the vernacular schools that taught in Chinese, but an increasing number was keen to learn English by enrolling in the British schools.
