The 'billion dollar hoax'

FEW ISSUES IN Hong Kong education are more emotive than that of the number of students we pack into the classrooms - the current political battle line between the government and the teachers' union.

Teachers, parents and children have in the past month taken to the streets to rally for small classes, convinced that if we're to have a paradigm shift in the way students are taught, the days of having as many as 40 students in one class should be numbered.

Now, they have argued, is the time as the number of children in our population drops and the government pushes ahead with its reforms emphasising more interactive and creative learning rather than old-fashioned talk-and-chalk. Rather than closing schools, the opportunity should be grasped to cut class sizes.

But last Saturday educators heard that this belief could be nothing more than a 'billion dollar hoax'.

This conclusion did not come from the government, but one of the world's leading experts on the class size issue, Professor John Hattie, of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, who claims to have studied 300,000 research papers and articles on the subject.

He was supported by Professor Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, another of the international big guns that the University of Hong Kong fielded for its high-profile conference on learning effectiveness and class sizes. Professor Hanushek has been an authority on the issue for the past 30 years. He argued that from an economic perspective, cutting class sizes across the board did not make sense.