A high court judgement delivered by a three-judge bench in Bangalore on July 2 striking down state government legislation making ‘mother tongue’ the compulsory medium of instruction in primary school could well have been influenced by a similar development in Hong Kong.
On June 6 the China administered territory’s education minister, Michael Suen Ming-yeung, lifted restrictions that forced four-fifths of the territory’s more than 500 secondary schools to teach in the ‘mother tongue’, i.e Cantonese, the main language of its residents and of southern China. Schools may switch to English, the language of the former colonial oppressor, from next year.
This reverses a decade-old policy adopted after Hong Kong’s reversion to China in 1997, in an assertion of independence from both former and present sovereign powers. Emotion may have played a large role in the decision. But it made some sense. Students speak Cantonese at home, and so using it is the easiest way to impart information and promote discussion. It is also the first language of most teachers: a study done at the time concluded that schools labelled ‘English medium’ were actually teaching in Cantonese but using English-language textbooks (with predictably chaotic results).
After much bureaucratic shuffling, 20 percent of schools were permitted to continue teaching in English. That may have made sense to teachers and administrators, but not to ambitious parents. They know that their offspring will need English to get ahead. Those who could flee the public system for costly private schools, or for the eight semi-private schools run on the British system, did so. The rest made extraordinary efforts to enter the minority of English-language schools. They have huge waiting lists; Cantonese ones gaping holes.
That helps explain the minister’s change of heart, for which no reason was given. So does a survey published last year, which concluded that students from the Cantonese schools did far worse than their peers in getting into universities — a result that horrified Hong Kong’s achievement-obsessed parents. And whatever educators think, employers from coffee bars to banks either require people to be bilingual or pay more to those who are. Private schools offering supplementary English tuition have mushroomed.
Hong Kong’s slow-moving educational bureaucracy has devoted much thought to how English could be offered without harming other studies, and without sacrificing a generation of teachers with a vested interest in a system based on their first language. Suen has skirted these difficult issues. A much-debated but still undisclosed formula will allow an increasing number of subjects to be taught in English.
Every step is controversial. As China’s most global city, Hong Kong needs skills in both English and Mandarin, or putonghua, China’s common language. Pragmatists want Hong Kong to drop Cantonese entirely in favour of the two more broadly used languages. But that may demand a level of cultural indifference which even Hong Kong cannot muster.
(Excerpted adapted from The Economist)