Letters | Give Hong Kong students a global education to ensure city’s competitiveness
- Readers discuss the need to modernise Hong Kong’s education system and end all Covid-19 travel restrictions
Having said farewell to a few friends with young children departing Hong Kong for a new life in the UK and Canada, I have come to realise that many people are choosing to leave not because of career prospects or politics, but because they have lost confidence in Hong Kong’s education system.
Having grown up in the local education system, and now with school-aged children of my own, I can say that the system today is worse not just because it puts too much emphasis on memorisation, as that is nothing new. The greatest evil of the current system is that it focuses on obsolete knowledge that puts pupils off learning.
Take the subject of Chinese; many pupils hate it by default, because 20 per cent of the curriculum focuses on learning “ancient Chinese”, while the remaining 80 per cent covers nothing practical in the use of Chinese language.
I never liked the subject of Chinese myself, but I never hated it and acquired sufficient skills to communicate well. Nowadays, children in Hong Kong learn Chinese like it is a foreign language. They study purely to get tested in public exams. How can one not feel distaste?