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Stella Lee

CONTROVERSY deepened yesterday over Education Department censorship of a school textbook account of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

  Legislators said they would summon Director of Education Dominic Wong Shing-wah to explain why he had ordered publishers to remove an 80-word passage from a new Form Three Chinese History textbook.

   Mr Wong this week told publishers Manhattan Press that textbooks should not cover events which had happened less than 20 years ago because they could not be judged fairly.

  The United Democrats and Meeting Point said yesterday the department should not cut politically sensitive subjects from textbooks.

  Legislator Cheung Man-kwong, who represents the education sector, said he would call Mr Wong to the Education Panel meeting this month to explain his comments.

  Mr Cheung said he was approaching other panel members for support.

  Describing Mr Wong's decision as ''a challenge to freedom of speech'', he said: ''It is a stupid and ridiculous precedent. I am very disappointed the director is so insensitive to social changes.''   Fellow panel member Tik Chi-yuen said Mr Wong's decision would ''encourage teachers to drop politically sensitive subjects''.

  The decision to use 20 years as a boundary to define historic text should not have been made without consultation with the public, he said.

   Au Pak-kuen, a member of Curriculum Development Council which sets school syllabuses, said the 20-year limit was ridiculous.

  Manhattan Press' executive director Jeffrey Shum Hing-wa said Mr Wong's guideline would cause chaos.

  ''As publishers, our role is passive. We have to listen to the department's instructions. We were very careful in writing the account of June 4, but still we have to remove it.''   He added: ''Many incidents that took place within the last 20 years are dealt with in existing textbooks.''   Examples included the arrest of Mao Zedong's wife, Jiang Qing, of the Gang of Four, in 1976; the reform policy launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978; the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984 and the opening of Daya Bay nuclear plant this year.

  Mr Shum said the new guidelines would create unfair competition, because old textbooks might get more extensive coverage than the new ones and pupils using differnt textbooks would acquire different knowledge.

  Mr Wong refused to comment yesterday.



Education chief to be quizzed on textbook cuts