The Best Students Will Learn English

Po King Choi, "'The best students will learn English': ultra-utilitarianism and linguistic imperialism in education in post-1997 Hong Kong," Journal of Education Policy, vol. 18, no. 6, Nov-Dec 2003, 673-94.

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Only the best schools were allowed to teach in English. (p. 674) In other words, the best students will learn English.

Language selection at any stage of schooling was blatantly segregationist and socially divisive. (p. 675)

It [language policy] helps maintain an elitist and socially divisive structure. (p. 676)

Brimer et al. (1985) states that: "There is no point in determining whether children in Hong Kong would learn more effectively through English or Chinese. We already know that they would learn more effectively through Chinese...Our problem arise because their learning of English will be more effectively achieved by using it as a medium of instruction. So long as this is a dominant aim of the education system then the question that remain relate to how it can be used with least distrubance of learning within the curriculum and for how many it can be used without serious and irrevocable disruption of learning." (A. Brimer et al. Effects of Medium of Instruction on the Achievement of Form 2 Students Hong Kong Secondary Schoools (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong and Education Department, 1985), p. 4) (p. 680)

Effective learning in English...only meant the ability of retaining information in English for the purpose of English testing, and for a language-dependent subject, i.e. history. (p. 681)

In 1989, Roy Harris, Chair of English Language, University of Hong Kong, stated bluntly: 'Cheap English doesn't go with quality goods, services or operations of any kind." He commented on the standards of English in Hong Kong: 'If Hong Kong English were up for auction on the international market, there isn't a self-respecting country in the world that would even put in a bid for it.' (p. 686)

An important question that is never asked, however, is to what extent, and for how much longer, Hong Kong has to sacrifice the development of young minds so as to ensure the production of the best linguistic brokers, instead of better citizens. (p. 687)

A lone voice in the commercial wilderness indeed, yet what he [a principal of a Chinese middle school] said brings out the extent to which a humanist discourse of education as cultural transmission has been subordinated to a narrowly utilitarin view of education as training for employable skills. (p. 689)

Language selection policy was both framed and legitimated by the narrowly utilitarian and labour market-driven goal of education in Hong Kong, with a highly elitist character that remains hidden in official discourses, whereby the socially endowed are selected for learning through a foreign language. (p. 691)