CHINA-EDUCATION: Shenzen Students Study With Hong Kong in Mind

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Yojana Sharma

SHENZHEN, China, Nov 21 1996 (IPS) - With the transfer of the British colony of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in mind, a number of schools have opened up in the modern and booming Chinese border town of Shenzhen to teach the Hong Kong curriculum.

These private schools are doing good business — far better than even they expected — catering to parents who believe that a Hong Kong-type education may improve the chances of their children going to Hong Kong after the Jun 30, 1997 hand-over.

Many Chinese believe that after the hand-over they will be able to freely enter Hong Kong. In Shenzhen there is even a strong belief that Shenzhen and Hong Kong will merge into one big city and to get into the best Hong Kong schools, their children will have to be prepared in advance.

The over-riding feeling is that Hong Kong education is better than on the Mainland and that it is the passport to entry to universities overseas.

“Many parents who are well-educated just want to provide their only-child with the very best education they can find. And Hong Kong is seen as having good schools,” said Shum Ho, curriculum coordinator at the Regent Primary School in Shenzhen which runs the Hong Kong curriculum.

The Regent School opened its doors in September 1995. After just a year in existence it already has 400 children on its rolls, and 40 teachers.

Many of them are children whose fathers already have the right to live in Hong Kong but whose Mainland wives and children must for the moment depend on one-way visas being issued to allow them to be reunited in Hong Kong.

“They are by no means wealthy, often the fathers are lorry drivers who frequently cross the border,” says Shum. “But still they prefer our school because they think it will help the children integrate better once they are allowed into Hong Kong.”

In the run-up to the hand-over, some 70 one-way visas are being issued a day to Chinese wives and children to prevent a sudden massive rush.

The Hong Kong government estimates that some 100,000 mainland Chinese children will have the right to live in Hong Kong after 1997 when current immigration restrictions on Chinese families of Hong Kong men and women will be lifted.

Of 35 children in each class at the Regent School up to half leave for Hong Kong every year, Shum says.

However, once in Hong Kong, many of the Mainland children often suffer.

According to one Hong Kong government study conducted a few years ago, of 4,700 Mainland children admitted to Hong Kong primary schools in the 1991-92 academic year, 46 per cent had to repeat a class or were put down a class — something that parents wish to avoid.

The existence of such schools teaching the Hong Kong curriculum is unusual because of the normally tight control over the curriculum maintained by China’s education authorities.

And unlike the “international” schools which run overseas curricula for the largely foreign student whose parents are working in China, the Shenzhen schools cater for local children.

But teachers at one such school say the Shenzhen authorities are surprisingly supportive, although the schools must follow the rules laid down by the provincial educational authority and use mainly the approved Mainland Chinese textbooks.

“We still have to communicate with the education department of Guangdong province and keep up with educational issues. But the authorities give us freedom. If what the education department is asking for is too political, too ideological, we won’t follow it,” says Shum.

“Even the central authorities in Beijing are not against such schools as ours,” she says “They realise that in some subjects, especially in English, the Hong Kong curriculum is much stronger.”

The provincial education department sees such schools as “specialised schools” providing an education in specific subjects which would not be offered in normal schools. But they also see such schools as helping raise the standards in Shenzhen.

“They think we provide better education administration and stimulus for other schools to improve their management. We train teachers,” says Shum who adds that the greatest difficulty is finding experienced teachers able to teach a curriculum with which they are unfamiliar.

Such schools cannot exist without official blessing because they depend on the official Labour Department to recruit teachers, although a small number of teachers commute from Hong Kong.

But they do not stray too much away from the Chinese system in order to prepare the children for entrance exams to Shenzhen’s secondary schools. They recognise that many children will not go to Hong Kong and need to be prepared for China’s own competitive system.

CHINA-EDUCATION: Shenzen Students Study With Hong Kong in Mind

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Yojana Sharma

SHENZHEN, China, Nov 21 1996 (IPS) - With the transfer of the British colony of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in mind, a number of schools have opened up in the modern and booming Chinese border town of Shenzhen to teach the Hong Kong curriculum.
(more…)