Is Hong Kong facing an education crisis? Curriculum changes, ‘red lines’ and families rushing to leave
- Mistrust of government and a new emphasis on national education could be accelerating an exodus from Hong Kong as parents seek a brighter future abroad for their children
Eddie Lo* is preparing for an imminent move to Britain with his wife, a primary-school teacher, and their two young children. They want their son settled in a British state primary school in time to sit the competitive 11-plus entrance examination next year.
Several of Lo’s friends with children, including other teachers in his wife’s school, are preparing for a similar move, adding to the 27,000 British National (Overseas) passport holders who have already taken advantage of the scheme offered by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson last year, for those holding BN(O) passports and their dependents to settle in Britain.
“In my wife’s school almost 10 per cent of the students left in the previous two years,” Lo says, “and more may leave this summer.”
Private education would be beyond the means of Lo, who works as a junior researcher in a Hong Kong university, but he just wants to get out of Hong Kong. His main motivation: “I don’t want my kids to keep being brainwashed and become patriotic zombies.”
He is not without trepidation as his family prepares for their new life, worrying about where they should live, how to find a good school, whether they can find work to replace their good jobs in Hong Kong education, to say nothing of racism. Lo knows from social media that “not all British are friendly to Hongkongers. Discrimination is everywhere, and my kid may suffer from school bullying.”
But it is not enough of a worry to dissuade the family from taking their chances.
Not in recent memory has Hong Kong education been so disrupted, by protest, politics and then a year of actual pestilence. And as Hong Kong parents peer into the months ahead, with the pandemic seeming to be on the retreat, they are making difficult decisions over their children’s education, in a context radically changed not only by Covid-19, but the new political landscape.
In early April, the Education Bureau confirmed that four core subjects of the senior secondary curriculum – Chinese and English languages, mathematics and liberal studies – would be “optimised”, in order to address Beijing’s concerns, following unrest in the city, that students were being taught unpatriotic ideals in classrooms.
