Hong Kong education

Some months ago, I was very into the education of Hong Kong and read a few scholarly articles published before 1997 in the 1980s and a few years after 1997.

Paul Morris's "The effect on the school curriculum of Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997," Journal of Curriculum Studies, Vol. 20, No. 6, 1988, pp. 509-20. "the junior secondary syllabus for integrated science was based on the Scottish Integrated Science Scheme. The social studies curriculum...was influenced by a Canadian project." (p. 511-2) I knew I realized this!

"In the case of history, the proportion of the syllabus devoted to the study of Chinese increased marginally from 1972 to 1984. In 1972, of the twelve topics in section A, eight were concerned with the history of China prior to 1949. In 1976 the ratio was seven out of ten and in 1984 and 1987 it was also seven out of ten topics. The focus remained on the period before 1949. The 1988 syllabus has been drastically revised to focus on 14 topics in total, with no discrimination between geographic sections or time periods and with the extension of the time period to allow the study of topics up to 1970. The topics chosen focus on the political history of the establishment of statehood and political independence by the USA, the UK, France, the USSR and China. The new syllabus provides pupils with a more politicized historical framework than was previously the case, and one more relevant to Hong Kong's future." (p. 514)

"In the case of Economic and Public Affairs (EPA)...the only change evident in 1976 were the removal of the term 'colony' and the specific inclusion of a topic concerned with the links between Britain and China." (p. 515)

Discussing the control of school textbooks, the Education Department suggested that "EPA and history textbooks submitted in 1986 should avoid reference to Hong Kong as a British colony...a history text and school atlas should not show Tibet and Mongolia as separate countries prior to 1949." (p. 517)

Paul Morris and Ian Scott's "Educational reform and policy implementation in Hong Kong,"Journal of Education Policy, Vol. 18, No. 1, 2003, pp. 71-84. And:
F. Kan and E. Vicker's "One Hong Kong, two histories: 'history' and 'Chinese history' in the Hong Kong school curriculum," Comparative Education, Vol. 38, No. 1, 2002, pp. 13-89.

Evangelicals and Wal-Mart

Another article about Evangelicals after reading one about them and Hollywood film Fireproof (2008), it is Rebekah Peeples Massengill's "Why Evangelicals Like Wal-Mart: Education, Region, and Religious Group Identity," Sociology of Religion, Vol. 72, No. 1, 2011, pp. 50-77.

Self-identified evangelicalism is consistently associated with approval of Wal-Mart, while college education is linked to disapproval of it. Interestingly, the same effect does not persist among evangelicals, for whom college education has no consistent, significant effect on the odds of judging the giant retailer unfavorably. Massengill argues that education may function differently for evangelicals than for the larger population, offsetting the liberalizing effects that are typically assumed to accompany attending college.

階級是會遺傳的！

今日中午和中學同學聚舊上茶樓（那間酒店的中菜廳應該叫茶樓嗎？還不是一樣吵鬧）。舊同學間中，有半年不見的，也有越過十年不見的，更有不知道我已經結婚兩年多，還半摧帶問我何時結婚的。我想，我是太自閉，太潛了。

舊同學有一對「好」子女，為她高興，卻為她擔憂。原來，小朋友不懂禮貌，不會打招呼。母親三摧四請，放棄。幸好，沒有喚我叔叔，舒一口氣。我還是喜歡一句哥哥。舊同學引同事一句育兒口訣，使我為她放心：你急，他不急；千萬，不要急。或許，禮貌是急不來的。長大後，他就會懂。

回家後，看著案上的書，忐忑不安。書是三浦展的《階級是會遺傳的：不要讓你的孩子跌入「下流階級」》（《遺傳》）。年前讀過他的《下流社會》（2005），養老孟司的《傻瓜的圍牆》（2003）和內田樹的《下流志向：為什麼孩子不上學、不工作》，令我對階級向下流很在意。讀到《遺傳》，更覺憂慮。這是一本令父母不安，教師心寒的書。

假如你已經、打算或即將為人父母，想想以下的問題。假如你身邊的人，親戚朋友，也已經、打算或即將為人父母，也設身處地想想。

一、先從父母親的經濟能力和背景設想（由我作為男人的角度出發）：
你的收入高嗎？
父親的收入越高，孩子的成績越好。進一步來說，收入比學歷的影響大。
你認真嗎？有條有理嗎？有禮貌嗎？
父親越認真，越有條理，越有禮貌，孩子成績就越好。
你的太太的學歷高嗎？假如她是全職主婦，她婚前的收入高嗎？
高學歷和曾是高收入的母親，較在意孩子的成績。
她小時侯的成績好嗎？
母親小時侯的成績越好，孩子成績越好。
她的人生觀如何？
事實上，這對孩子的成績影響不大。
成績好的孩子，母親比較有條有理又有趣，通常是有計劃且動作俐落的人。

二、飲食習慣
成績越好的孩子，飲食越均衡，越有規律，母親也越注重營養均衡。反之，成績越差，越依賴便利店的食物。
成績越好的孩子，母親越喜歡做菜。反之，覺得吃東西很麻煩的母親，孩子成績較差。

三、聰明孩子的特徵
你喜歡閱讀嗎？
孩子成績與父親的書籍閱讀量成正比。
你的太太呢？
成績好的孩子，母親常閱讀育兒雜誌。
孩子的生活習慣比成績更重要。越好的生活態度，成績越好。學習鋼琴與成績好壞成正比。成績好孩子偏愛文學與藝術。

四、生活品質
你是否周末休息？
父親周休二日，孩子成績較好。父親有休息時間才能配合孩子學習。
孩子成績越好，親子越常一起去圖書館和博物館。成績越好的孩子，親子交談越多。孩子是否有個人的房間，與成績無關。家庭文化涵養影響孩子的成績。

五、母親的滿意度
孩子的成績是母親的成績。母親的滿意度與孩子的成績成正比。孩子比自己努力，母親的滿意度越高。對孩子越滿意，夫妻的生活滿意度越高。
「母親們似乎並不很期待教育政策的改革，反而比較注重英語、電腦等學習。［而且以孩子成績較差的母親為多］換句話說，母親們並不期待理論性的修改，而是比較重視能實際應用於社會的『實用性教育』。」（頁218）

讀著教育改革和社會結構部份。不禁令我想到，填鴨教育是公平的，學生的成績完全依賴學生的能力和毅力；多元學習是階級的，學生的成績取決於家庭文化涵養。三浦說，社會產業不斷向服務業傾斜，競爭越激烈，越多受薪階層需要周末或深夜工作，使家庭生活品質越來越低，間接妨礙孩子學習能力的發展，形成階級差異擴大和固定的趨勢。

最後，三浦說若將大學比喻為產業，大學也屬於夕陽產業。令我深思。

Britain vs Europe

It's a great joy to read Richard J. Evans's Cosmopolitan islanders : British historians and the European continent (CUP, 2009), which grew from his Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 2009, his literary skill being one of the major factors. Looking at the bar charts he provides on historians working on domestic or foreign topics (from Medieval to Early Modern and Modern), and non-domestic historians working on European or extra-European topics, across the UK, the USA, France, Germany, and Italy, however restricted to his methodology, I found it very engaging and stimulating and it certainly deserves the explanation and observation given from Evans exquisite pen and, to be fair, defense from the Continental European countries in question.

Evans shows that 44% of British historians work on non-British history, while only 23% of French historians, 15% of German historians and 12% of Italian historians work outside the history of their own country. Evans argues that 'British historians are almost twice or even more than twice as cosmopolitan as historians of other major Western European countries' (p. 12)

One might add that, as a reviewer (Robert Gildea, History Workshop Journal, Issue 70, Autumn 2010, p. 239-45) said, in France a historian of Britain would be employed in a languages department rather than a history department. In his review on Evans's book, Robert Gildea lamented that in France leading academics control high-profile series for publishing houses and when one of his books was turned down for translation by a French publisher the only feedback he received was 'Pierre Nora dit non.' French historians are not only academics; they consider themselves to be the high priests of the Republic whose calling is to defend its principles. Their work often privileges a Jacobin-centralist, gender-neutral citizen approach which marginalizes approaches that may subvert that model.

the historiography and themes debated by scholars of Continental history were far more open and less focused on a narrow set of political questions than it seemed to be in the little British history I did...It was not only insular but seemed to argue about the same political topics with all the paths already charted. There seemed little room for branching out and making new paths. (the Cambridge medievalist, Rosamond McKitterick, p. 167)

In Britain, Leif Jerram, who teaches German History at Manchester, "'the world out there' has expectations of historians that go far, far beyond the formation of the nation. In France, Spain, China, Italy, 'the world out there' does not have these expectations." (p. 7)

Very few non-British historians have made any notable contribution to the study of British history in the medieval period, and few, apart from Americans, to its study in the early modern and modern eras. (p. 10) Andreas Gestrich, Director of German Historical Institutes in London, remarks that "the problem is that present German research on British history is not as strong as British research on Germany." (p. 11) Christopher Duggan, Professor of Italian History at Reading, thinks that "the tradition of studying non-British countries does seem one of the remarkable strengths of British historiography (very few Italian historians, to my knowledge, work on modern non-Italian history)". (p. 5-6)

The French have seldom seen any need to translate history books from English into their own language, since in their view, and with relatively few exceptions, they cover their own history perfectly well themselves. (p. 39) Openness of any kind to foreign contributions to their own history has long been much less common amongst French historians. (p. 36) Robert Gildea, Professor of Modern History at Oxford, comments that there are "a sort of closed-shop of French historian (who also control history series in the publishing houses), who do not want to know what non-French historians think, or think that only French historians understand French history." (p. 39) Robert Tombs, who teaches Modern French History at Cambridge, feels that French culture is not very open to outside influences, at least no compared to British. (p. 38) Peter Jones, who worked in France for many years, notes, "I am struck, even today, by how reluctant the French are to travel and uproot themselves even within their own country." (p. 206)

The frequency of translation of British historical works into European languages is all the more remarkable since it is undertaken on an entirely commercial basis. The German government had for a long time provided subsidies through the Inter Nationes organization for translating German books into other languages, the French government has done the same thing through the Office du Livre, and the Italian government provides a similar service too. (p. 22)

am I permitted?

the world is divided into people who wait for others to give them permission to do the things they want to do and people who grant themselves permission.

Lynn Seelig's What I wish I knew when I was 20 : a crash course on making your place in the world (New York: HarperOne, 2009), p. 57.

what went wrong?

We all have experienced failure in one way or the other. There are times when we make mistakes, misunderstand someone, underestimate others, and overestimate ourselves. To err is human. Being wrong is easy. Admitting it is hard.


To use Kathryn Schulz's words, the author of Being wrong : adventures in the margin of error (New York: Ecco Press, 2010), "if you haven't experienced them, you haven't fully lived. As with love and loss, so too with error. Sure, it can hurt you, but the only way to protect yourself from that potential is by closing yourself off to new experiences and other people. And to do that is to throw your life out with the bathwater." (p. 200)


Schulz quotes the New York psychoanalyst Irna Gadd that our capacity to tolerate error depends on our capacity to tolerate emotion that require us to feel something: a wash of dismay, a moment of foolishness, guilt over our dismissive treatment of someone else who turned out to be right. True, we are too exhausted or too sad or too far out of our element to risk feeling worse. Rigidity serves to protect a certain inner fragility. (p. 199)

City class

My class on City is coming to an end this week. It forces me hard to think about the following questions raised by the urban studies theorist Richard Florida (Who's your city? : how the creative economy is making where to live the most important decision of your life (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2009)):

1. How do you like the place you're living now? Is it somewhere you really want to be? Does it give your energy? When you walk out onto the street - or the country lane - in the morning, does it fill you with inspiration, or stress? Does it allow you to be the person you really want to be? Are you achieving your personal goals? Is it a place you would recommend to your relatives and friends?
2. Have you thought about moving? If so, what are the top three places on your radar screen? What do you like about them? Specifically, what do you think they offer your? How would your life be different in these places?
3. Have you ever sat down and compared where you're living now to those places? Honestly, have you given this a fraction of the thought and energy you've given to your job and career prospects, or if you're single, to your dating life? (p. 9)

He gives three key ideas about choosing the ideal cities:

1. Despite all the hpye over globalization and the "flt world," place is actually more important to the global economy than ever before. (couldn't agree more)
2. Places are growing more diverse and specialized - from their economic makeup and job market to the quality of life they provide and the kinds of people that live in them.
3. We live in a highly mobile society, giving most of us more say over where we live. (p. 13)

Will you be living in Hong Kong in 2020? Will I? Perhaps. 


All the best to you all.

讀陳之藩三

《劍河倒影》是陳之藩在劍橋大學「攻讀」（時任Fellow）博士學位的三年間（1969-71）寫下的散文，共有十三篇散文（另加序：如夢的兩年）：

1. 實用呢，還是好奇呢？
2. 理智呢，還是感情呢？
3. 明善呢，還是察理呢？
4. 一夕與十年
5. 王子的寂寞
6. 自己的路
7. 圖畫式的與邏輯式的
8. 勇者聲音
9. 古瓶
10. 羅素與伏爾泰－－兼答林語堂先生
11. 風雨中談到深夜
12. 噴煙制度考
13. 不鑄不錯

中國人到劍橋，想不起徐志摩，就會想起李約瑟；前者的浪漫使人沉醉，後者的勇氣令人肅然。〈實用呢，還是好奇呢？〉討論李約瑟。假如說李約瑟中年出家，研究起中國科技史來，是出於好奇的話，「我們反過來問，我們能不能找到一個中國的李約瑟，以半生的時間，淹在南港的書庫裏去研究歐洲的科學史來解答這個問題：『歐洲近五百年的科學發展主要是為了「好奇」。這個假設是對呢？還是錯呢？』」（頁5）陳氏續談：「我掩卷凝思了半天，我想在中國目前還找不出這樣一個『笨』人來。也就是說，在這種笨人不能產生之前，我們所謂的科學，還是抄襲的、短見的、實用的，也就是說，真正的科學是不會產生的。」（頁6）中國近百年的歷史中，沒有多少笨人，也沒有多少人願意當個笨人，更是容不下笨人。

人生的目的是什麼？人生的光榮又是什麼？神甫說：「是見到受餓的人分給他一塊麵包；見到受凍的人，送給他一件衣服。把那個醉倒的人扶住，把那個跌例的人攙起，凡是自己覺得是善的就直捷了當的作出來。人生的光榮，是不踏死路旁快死的蟲，是不摧殘樹下受傷的鳥，是把自己口袋裏的錢分出一半來給一個需要那一半錢的同類！」（〈明善呢，還是察理呢？〉，寫於1969年10月14日，頁 18）

半陰不雨的英格蘭天氣是什麼個樣？陳氏寫道：「如果用畫筆畫呢，兩筆似乎就夠了。先用墨在筆沾點水，在上面一抹，那是天；然後再加點綠在下邊一抹，那是地；這幅灰、暗、冷、清的畫面差不多算完了。當然在這兩抹之間，偶爾有些笨樹，像八大山人之筆所畫的，乍看起來很笨的樹；偶爾有些老屋，像美國那位老祖母畫家所畫的類似童畫的那種老屋。這整幅天氣給人的印象，正似英國人的言談與神色：低沉又暗淡......」（〈自己的路〉，寫於1969年11月21日，頁36-37）

書生憂國，陳氏是典型。「我常常想：我們中國如果有個劍橋，如果出個凱因斯，也許生靈塗炭不至於到今天這步田地。因為沒有真正陶鑄人才的地方，所以沒有真正人才出現；因為沒有澄明清晰的見解，所以沒有剛毅果敢的決策與作為。」（頁56）「那麼，怎樣才能辦出一個劍橋來？校旁挖一條河？多買些茶壺茶碗？教授自掏腰包？學生辯到深夜？我有時感到困惑，有時又感到焦灼！」（〈勇者的聲音〉，寫於1969年12月29日，頁57）

Rider, Elephant, and Path

how could you move an elephant? Each has an elephant living comfortably inside the mind. Chip and Dan Health tell us how to motivate the elephant, i.e. how to change. I found their recent book Switch: how to change things when change is hard (New York : Broadway Books, c2010) thoughtful and engaging. Here I quote:

For things to change, somebody somewhere has to start acting differently. Maybe it's you, maybe it's your team. Picture that person (or persons).

Each has an emotional Elephant side and a rational Rider side. You've got to reach both. And you've also got to clear the way for them to succeed. In short, you must do three things:

DIRECT the Rider

- follow the bright spots. Investigate what's working and clone it.

- script the critical moves. Don't think big picture, think in terms of specific behaviors.

- point to the destination. Change is easier when you know where you're going and why its worth it.

MOTIVATE the Elephant

- find the feeling. Knowing something isn't enough to cause change. Make people feel something.

- shrink the change. Break down the change until it no longer spooks the Elephant.

- grow your people. Cultivate a sense of identity and instill the growth mindset.

SHAPE the Path

- tweak the environment. When the situation changes, the behavior changes. So change the situation.

- build habit. When behavior is habitual, it's "free" - it doesn't tax the Rider. Look for ways to encourage habits.

- rally the herd. Behavior is contagious. Help it spread. (p. 259)

The Heath brothers identify twelve common obstacles that people encounter as they fight for change, and provide some advice about overcoming them.

1. people don't see the need to change. advice: find the feeling, create empathy, tweak the environment.
2. I'm having the "not invented here" problem: people resist my idea because they say "We've never done it like that before."advice: highlight identity, find a bright spot that is invented here and clone it.
3. we should be doing something, but we're getting bogged down in analysis. advice: find the feeling, create a destination postcard, simplify the problem by scripting the critical moves.
4. the environment has shifted, and we need to overcome our old patterns of behavior. advice: create a new habit, set an action trigger, script the critical moves
5. people simply aren't motivated to change. advice: create a new identity, create a destination postcard, lower the bar, use social pressure, smooth the Path
6. I'll change tomorrow. advice: shrink the change so you can start today, set an action trigger for tomorrow, make yourself accountable to someone.
7. people keep saying, "It will never work." advice: find a bright spot, engineer a success, carve out a free space for some who do think it will work
8. I know what I should be doing, but I'm not doing it. advice: create an Elephant problem, lower the bar, tweak the environment, get someone else involved to spread the influence
9. you don't know my people. They absolutely hate change. advice: question: how many of your people are married or have a child?
10. people were excite at first, but then we hit some rough patches and lost momentum. advice: focus on building habit, remind people how much they've already accomplished, teach the growth mindset.
11. it's just too much. advice: shrink the change, develop the growth mindset
12. everyone seems to agree that we need to change, but nothing's happening. advice: script the critical move, create the Path, find a bright spot (p. 261-4)

Finally, I am looking forward to visit the book's website: www.switchthebook.com/resources. Their earlier book includes Made to stick: why some ideas survive and other die (2007), which I read some time ago.

animal turn

I just read a paper by the Geographer Philip Howell of Cambridge about race, space, and prostitution in colonial Hong Kong ("Race, Space and the Regulation of Prostitution in Colonial Hong Kong," Urban History, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 229-248) and then I browsed his website for further information.

Interesting stuff found. He is working on a fascinating project: Social Relations between Humans and Other Animals in Victorian Britain. As a contribution to the 'animal turn', this project looks at the social relation between humans and other animals (humans, we, are animals after all). He says "the 'animal turn' is of significance because by analysing these geographies of human-animal relations, the social relations between human beings themselves can be illuminated, particularly with relation to the nature of the modern social order." The focus of the project is the development of practices of pet keeping. "Pet keeping," Howell argues, "becomes a paradigmatic urban practice, inseparable from the rise of the urban bourgeoisie and emblematic of their values."

It reminds me of a comical urban map of Shanghai in the 1930s showing the whereabouts of famous movie stars and celebrities (perhaps by a tabloid magazine?), in which one of the female movie stars is shown to be keeping a dog in her household, which seems to embody the popular Cantonese saying: living in a western-style mansion and keeping a western dog. How the ideas of pet keeping in cosmopolitan Shanghai had evolved appear to be an interesting area to explore.

middle class revisited

The Right's culture warriors did not openly attack the economic position of the middle class, but they did attach the university. In doing so, they created the conditions for repeated budget cuts to the core middle-class institution [i.e. university]. More fundamentally, they discredited the cultural conditions of mass-middle-class development, downsized the influence of its leading institution, the university, and reduced the social and political impacts of knowledge workers overall. (italic original. p. 11)

The middle class as an emerging anti-conservative bloc (p. 46):

Domain	Challenge	Middle-class bulwark	Emerging nonconservative middle class
Politics	Multiracial mass democracy	Expert rule; no power sharing	Majoritarian democracy; antielitism
Economy	Decline of profits, labor conditions	Market, growth, consumption, deregulation	Planned mixed economy; mass affluence; human needs
Culture	Qualitative, context-specific, cross-cultural knowledge	White supremacism; "cultural deficiency" of other groups	Cultural and social equality; self-development; liberation

Christopher Newfield's Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).