NN37, May 2006
Special Theme on Education and Training out of Poverty? A Status Report
REFLECTING ON THE DRIVERS OF CHANGE IN HONG KONG AND CHINA 1967 TO 1996
By Ruth Hayhoe, OISE/University of Toronto
When I moved to Hong Kong in 1967, I found a refugee society, in which many children were learning in makeshift schools on the rooftops of six-story resettlement estates, and the majority graduated from primary schools to enter burgeoning factories for toys, wigs, plastics and radio parts. A select few went through a restrictive and elitist secondary system and even fewer entered one of the two universities to become civil servants or professionals in medicine, law or education.Thirteen years later I settled in Shanghai for a two-year teaching assignment at Fudan University, and saw many similarities to Hong Kong of the sixties in the crowded housing arrangements, with almost a total lack of such amenities as refrigerators and washing machines. Most people shopped in open markets twice a day, as there was no way to preserve fresh food. The education system was struggling to recover from the devastation of the Cultural Revolution and secondary education had been downsized in an effort to restore standards, while university education had begun almost afresh from the reinstitution of entrance exams in 1977, after a ten-year hiatus.
Over my years in Shanghai, and subsequent frequent return visits, it was almost like seeing a ?déjà vu? of Hong Kong?s development, as light industry took off, and daily lives were transformed by the simple conveniences of telephones, refrigerators, washing machines, television sets, almost all made in China. At a later point, Shanghai followed Hong Kong in re-creating itself as a financial, business and high tech centre rather than one of manufacturing, while other parts of China absorbed an ongoing manufacturing boom.
What has education had to do with these changes? The obstacles facing the development of an education that would make a better life possible for ordinary people in these two very different societies were completely different.
In the case of Hong Kong, it was surprising to see how the British colonial government took a far more laissez-faire attitude to educational provision than Britain itself. Much primary and secondary education was delivered by religious organizations, with modest government subsidy, and the expansion of higher education lagged far behind world trends, until negotiations about Hong Kong?s return to China led to fear of a damaging brain drain. In a brief decade the number of universities then grew from two to seven, and the Hong Kong Institute of Education was created to up-grade teacher education to a professional level that had already been the norm in Britain for several decades. There can be little doubt that educational development followed upon, rather than stimulating economic development. Remarkably, however, Hong Kong had the human talent and resourcefulness it needed to flourish under rapidly changing political and economic externalities.
In the case of Shanghai, and the wider Chinese society, obstacles to sound educational development were created more by political rashness than political neglect. A series of movements, culminating in the Cultural Revolution of 1966, left teachers utterly demoralized, and schools hugely expanded yet disturbed by unremitting class struggle. Enrolment in academic secondary schools grew from 9 million to 58 million over this revolutionary decade, but ?academic? had little meaning, and those recommended on political grounds for higher education often had standards at the lower secondary level or below. With the reforms of 1978, an elitist system was re-instated, then gradually transformed through dedicated efforts to enhance equity and access, just in time for the remarkable leap to mass higher education initiated in China in the mid-1990s. Like Hong Kong, yet on a vastly larger scale, China has thus had the quality of people it needed for its rapid economic rise.
What lessons does the experience of Hong Kong and China have for other developing societies? It is the people from whom we may have more to learn than the policy-makers. Fine-grained studies of the learning practices of children and young people in Confucian-heritage societies, such as Stevenson and Stigler?s The Learning Gap (1992) and Watson and Biggs? The Chinese Learner (1996) open up a world of insight into successful patterns of learning in very ordinary and often restrictive classroom environments. It begins with a deep-rooted belief in the infinite potential of the human person. ?The concept that everyone is educable, everyone can become a sage, and everyone is perfectible forms the basic optimism and dynamism towards education in the Confucian tradition,? states well-known Asian comparativist, Lee Wing On. (The Chinese Learner, p.30). It goes on to families where older siblings help younger ones, and the family as a whole embraces academic success for each child as a main goal. It involves teachers who organize their large classes in such a way that children learn to take responsibility for classroom order and to help each other in their study tasks.
Are the lessons of Confucian heritage societies, the values, attitudes and behaviours of their families, teachers and children, transferable elsewhere? This is a fascinating question. At the very least, it is important to be aware of this dimension of the East Asian success story, rather than giving all the credit to educational policies or systems. These have been strikingly different over time, and among the eight generally recognized Confucian heritage societies, which include Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam.