YOUNG people in Hong Kong are often described as lacking a sense of history, attributed to the ''colonial education'' they receive at school. While many may not agree with this view, the recent decree by the Director of Education, that textbooks should not include incidents that have taken place within the past 20 years, will ensure this becomes true.
Dominic Wong Shing-wah's decree, taken in reaction to a Form Three history textbook's inclusion of a brief account of the ''June 4 incident'' in 1989, reflects on the wisdom, or the lack of it, of the decision-makers at the department which keeps an eye on what is being taught at school.
Indeed, the department has a history of being paranoid about anything vaguely political or controversial, even if the context is about what happened 150 years ago.
In 1986, Macmillan Publishers Ltd was asked to delete the word ''colony'' from a textbook in reference to Hong Kong being declared a British colony in 1843.
The department said it did that to respect China's view that it did not regard Hong Kong as a colony. In 1972, Huang Hua, then China's permanent delegate to the United Nations, sent a letter to the UN Special Committee on Colonialism asking it to drop Hong Kong and Macau from the list of colonial territories covered by its declaration on the granting of independence.
Then 11 years away from 1997, textbook publishers warned of the danger of the textbook review system opening the way for the post-1997 Special Administrative Region government to exercise political control over what students should and should not learn.