WHEN Chris Patten included education as being part of the great Hong Kong success story in his speech at the Trade Development Council's annual dinner in London on Wednesday, Sansan Ching must have choked. ''Theoretically, a local child need not have gone to kindergarten in order to enter Primary One, but that's absolute nonsense. You simply cannot survive the first week without that grounding, because you have to be able to copy the homework instructions on the blackboard into your handbook. ''You also have to be snappy when the teacher tells you to get out this or that textbook and be able to follow a whole heap of other instructions. The last year of kindergarten is devoted to all that. It's called 'orientation'.'' The director of the Hong Kong Council of Early Childhood Education and Services (CECES) does not bother to hide her bitter frustration. All those years of campaigning, and still the same mess. Next week, CECES will issue the first bound copies of its recently published report on the training needs of Hong Kong's pre-school workforce: the teachers and helpers engaged by kindergartens and child care centres. It is a document which should be studied assiduously by the Governor and anybody else who claims to have Hong Kong's best interests at heart, because most of it is frankly horrifying. The author is Professor Marjory Ebbeck of the University of South Australia, who was in Hong Kong on sabbatical leave early in the year. What she found was that the economic miracle known as Hong Kong was 20 years behind developed countries in early childhood teaching and caring qualifications. None of Professor Ebbeck's findings came as news to Ms Ching - that the Government's policy on pre-school education added up to a disgraceful cop-out, that teaching methods were largely antiquated and dangerous to children's mental health, and that most of the teaching and caring was being done by the under-trained, incompetent and immature. For two decades she has fought for a major overhaul of the system, only to be repeatedly disappointed. But she has had her victories. Thanks to the furore she stirred up, Primary One entrance examinations - ''horribly traumatic ordeals lasting up to three hours'' - were banned, at least officially, in 1982. But the big revolution has not taken place and the indomitable Ms Ching will not rest until it does. She is up against some formidable obstacles. ''A lot of eminent people are saying: 'If we allocate public funding fairly, the problem will be solved'. But what do they mean by fair? ''Even the vice-chancellor of Hong Kong University, Professor Wang Gungwu, has referred to the 'three basic stages of education' - primary, secondary and tertiary - and I'm afraid most people feel that way. ''What they don't appreciate is that holding up this tree of learning are the roots and, if they are weak, the branches will wither. ''I believe a lot of the youth problems we have been seeing in recent years - drugs, triad activity and worst, suicide - are directly related to Hong Kong's early learning situation. ''Children as young as two are now being forced to read and write. Kindergartens are no longer children's gardens, but cramming centres.'' MS Ching, former kindergarten headmistress, says she knows how this has come about. At the heart of it, she says, is a dichotomy created by the Government: separate systems run by Social Welfare and Education, which mean that training standards set by oneare not accepted by the other. To this divisive, wasteful situation can be added many other problems, among them a total lack of pre-service training, salaries that would insult a domestic helper and the vast potential for abuse caused by the fact the every kindergarten in Hong Kong is privately run. If anything, the more elite ones are the worst offenders. ''Everyone knows that certain kindergartens feed directly into certain primary schools and that entrance testing still goes on. ''The difference these days is that not only are children checked for a high level of literacy and numeracy, but their parents' social and financial standing is examined. ''We feel the effects even at CECEC. Our chairman, Sylvia Cheung, happens to be the principal of the Diocesan Preparatory School, and an amazing number of parents come to us in the hope that she will issue their children with a sort of educational passport.'' Sansan Ching was 13 when, real passport in hand, she boarded a Dutch liner bound for Australia. ''I loved every minute of it,'' she says of her years as a boarder at Melbourne's Methodist Ladies College. ''Back in Hong Kong, where it was all memory work, I'd expended a lot of energy avoiding learning, and was always on the borderline of being kept back.'' The born-again scholar went on to the University of California, Berkeley - ''an amazing place to be during the late 1960s'' - where she bloomed even more extravagantly. Only later did she learn that her paternal grandfather had attended the same campus. ''He was sent there by the Empress Dowager during her last years. She hated foreigners, but reasoned that someone had to get to know them, so she sent a couple of scholars from each province. ''My grandfather was one of the two from Canton. He took an entire entourage including his wife with her little bound feet.'' Also exposed to the West was Ms Ching's other grandfather who did his master's degree in Syracuse and lived long enough to become Hong Kong's oldest Methodist minister. Not surprisingly, the next generation proved highly interesting. ''I learned about education from my mother who ran a music school for the blind from our home in Austin Road because she didn't want to see them weaving baskets in the streets. ''They performed for Lady Bird Johnson, the king and queen of Thailand and other celebrities, and for years we had a family orchestra every Saturday night, with the blind musicians joining in. ''When the school finally disbanded - a shame because it was a very innovative project for its time - my mother's involvement in public life ended. ''My father's is still going on. He's an ophthalmologist who introduced contact lenses to Hong Kong and has always had great passions for odd things, like raising earthworms.'' Ms Ching is open about her own passions: educationist husband Dr Tony Sweeting and their five children, followed closely by a farm in Ma On Shan, Sai Kung, which she is helping to run and, of course, the fight for a better deal for Hong Kong's youngest citizens. ''In Chinese culture, there is the term tung shi, which means 'the age of reason', and traditionally that was reached when you turned eight. ''Until then, the child was meant to enjoy a lot of fun and freedom, but in Hong Kong, the age of reason is being pushed lower and lower - almost to the point where there is no childhood left at all.'' Sansan Ching fervently hopes the age of enlightenment will prevent that tragedy.