National education must be scrapped, church groups say

Two church bodies have urged the government to scrap national education guidelines and send the curriculum back to the drawing board, to avoid schools coming under any pressure to teach the subject.

The Anglican Church - known as the Sheng Kung Hui - and the Council of the Church of Christ in China said yesterday that the concessions Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying made in withdrawing mandatory lessons failed to allay their worries.

The two sponsoring bodies, which represent about 150 primary and secondary schools in total, said their schools would not use the government funding that had been granted for the subject.

Leung scrapped a three-year deadline for implementation on Saturday, saying schools were free to choose independently whether to teach the subject. The government would review the subject's guidelines, he said.

Timothy Ha Wing-ho, education adviser to Sheng Kung Hui, said he welcomed Leung's U-turn, but as long as the guidelines existed, schools still faced the risk of being pressured to teach the subject.

"The guidelines leave loose ends to tie up," Ha said, without commenting on where the pressure might come from.

He said schools under the church already had moral education. The church would study the feasibility of teaching uncontroversial elements of national education, such as Chinese history, "but there's no time frame".