Coronavirus has dealt class of 2020 a bad hand, but China’s class of ’77 offers an encouraging lesson

Name: Hong Kong secondary students learn online amid coronavirus fears
Uploaded: 2020-07-24T22:00:16.000Z
Duration: 3 min 51 s
Description: Hong Kong secondary students learn online amid coronavirus fears

While graduating in a recession year can hit earnings and career prospects, life eventually rights itself, as the experience of the first batch of Chinese university students who graduated after the Cultural Revolution shows

Reading Time:4 minutes

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Students with face masks look through their notes at the University of Hong Kong campus in Pok Fu Lam on April 1. Photo: Nora Tam

David Dodwell

Published: 6:00am, 25 Jul 2020Updated: 7:14pm, 3 Aug 2020

As we nosedive into the world’s worst recession in the better part of a century, this is clearly not a good time to be a student, despite the brave and enthusiastic faces of the 50,000 18-year-olds who on July 22 received their Diploma of Secondary Education results.

Frankly, it is not a good moment for most families – as I was reminded this week, sharing farewell drinks with a long-serving Cathay Pacific pilot friend whose once secure future has crumbled around him and his family. This pandemic-induced recession is set to wreck millions of lives in countries across the world.

But I still feel a special sense of pain for our precariously poised students, in particular those graduating from university or college this year, as they try to secure that first tentative toehold in the working world.

Perhaps the empathy comes from my own traumatic memories as a student in the middle of recession-ridden Britain in the early 1970s. I remember walking awkwardly past the young street sleepers in freezing cold London doorways and shivering at the thought that this might be my plight at some point in the future.

The class of 2020 has, by most standards and in most places in the world, faced a perfect storm of challenges. In Hong Kong, the months of street violence through the second half of 2019, and the onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic since February, have presented gigantic challenges for anyone seriously trying to study. The suspension of classes and enforced online learning added severe practical challenges.

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Hong Kong secondary students learn online amid coronavirus fears

The delay and cancellation of many exams, and the need to resort to course work and predictive grades as a basis for grading will leave scars of injustice for decades.