No one should shed a tear for the passing or watering-down of the mother-tongue teaching policy. It was conceived in ignorance and executed with savagery. It belongs to the darkest chapter in the most educationally hyperactive period in Hong Kong's history. Frankly, it belongs in history's scrap heap.
For all the pain and humiliation this policy brings, there is nothing to show for it. It will be remembered chiefly for the naked bureaucratic bullying and nasty name-calling. English schools caught teaching in mixed code are branded as 'selling dog meat dressed as mutton'.
It is an overdose that almost kills the patient. Those who fathered it are now scrambling to save face when they should be saving our children's education.
Thank God for our avuncular education secretary Michael Suen Ming-yeung and his minimalist instincts. He has retracted the strong elbows, and restored a semblance of civility and sanity.
This policy was triggered by a tragic misreading of what our schools need: better teachers and smaller classes. Instead, educational pretenders justified it with the use of pseudo-scientific figures. Schools are only allowed to teach in English if 85 per cent of its students are English-capable. Students in a primary school can graduate to an affiliated English secondary school. But the latter must have 85 per cent of its incoming students in the top 40 per cent of the student population, thus derailing the through-train.
The provenance of this percentage remains a mystery. But it is cooked up to create the impression that this half-baked language policy is wholly scientifically based. A formula this twisted can only be the figment of a mind that is 85 per cent demented. Welcome to 'government by percentages'.
What they fail to see is that post-handover, this community has turned inwardly Chinese. Students in Tin Shui Wai and other poorer areas have zero contact with English. They learn English fearfully, not as a second language, but as a foreign one.