No 'only' about this teacher
HE DESCRIBES HIMSELF as 'only a teacher', but what a teacher he was. When Arthur Hinton returns to Hong Kong he is greeted by hundreds of friends. And the vast majority were once the children he taught as the founding senior master and then principal of Queen Elizabeth School in Mongkok.
This week the 84-year-old was once again feted by hundreds of friends when he returned to Hong Kong to join the 50th anniversary celebrations of the government secondary school he did so much to mould. His career was also capped last week with an honorary doctorate from the Hong Kong Institute of Education, which has fond memories of him as a former principal of Northcote College, which later became a part of the HKIEd.
Dr Hinton arrived in Hong Kong more than half a century ago with a huge heart and passion for teaching, which on many occasions in his three decades here put him at odds with rigid colonial authority.
As a colonial officer, he was disappointed to find himself initially assigned to teaching mainly expatriate children at King George V School. His interest was to work with the local population and he soon managed to move to King's College on Hong Kong Island before being assigned to QES.
From the start, Dr Hinton, a Quaker and a pacifist, cut a liberal figure among unbending attitudes - railing against everything from a government request to take time out of school to inspect government machine stores to an order to mark down a student who a principal didn't like.
'It was a rigid system, and many schools were rigid. Teachers were autocrats and students were to obey,' he said at QES this week.
At King's it was order of the day for the principal to cane boys for minor infringements like rolling up their shirt sleeves. The young Dr Hinton shunned such a climate of fear when he was transferred to help build QES, a new government school serving mainly poor families. He fostered a friendly approach, with the focus on nurturing responsibility and self-discipline rather than rules and punishment.