The government needs to adapt its approach to gifted education to a more local context or it will be 'doomed to fail', an expert has warned.
Shane Phillipson, associate professor at the Hong Kong Institute of Education's Department of Educational Psychology, Counselling and Learning Needs, said concepts of giftedness varied widely between different cultures, but most research was viewed through a 'western lens'.
He said the challenge for the proposed Hong Kong Gifted Academy - announced in the chief executive's policy address in October last year and due to be set up later this year - would be to mould the government's take on gifted education, which relied heavily on the American, to make it mesh with the indigenous Chinese understanding of giftedness in the modern Hong Kong context.
The enduring influence of Confucian values meant Chinese societies such as Hong Kong's saw giftedness differently from the way it was interpreted in the west.
'It seemed to me to be a good idea to directly ask people from different cultures what they thought giftedness might be ... as it is understood in their own culture, without the need for comparison,' said Dr Phillipson.
The results showed a wide variation in ways to define 'giftedness', how to measure it and approaches to dealing with it in the classroom.