Tim Hamlett's Hong Kong‏

Tim Hamlett's Hong Kong [南華早報] 2009-07-15 CITY2 CITY

It is good to know creationism has now been banned from our schools' biology curriculum. I must admit to some doubts as to whether the education bureaucrats would have the gumption to deal with the matter forthrightly.

What remains to be seen, though, is what effect this will have. Many schools are run by voluntary organisations of various kinds. One of the more common kinds is religious, a curious state of affairs because Hong Kong is not a particularly religious place, and the popularity of a particular religion has no connection with the number of schools it runs.

This anomaly is an accident of history that can be traced to the 1870s, when the British government turned its mind to the creation of a national education system. At that time there were two bodies running large numbers of schools in the UK - one for the Church of England, and one jointly working for the other Protestant variations.

Between them, they claimed to be catering for 80 per cent of the population. So part of the solution adopted was in effect to nationalise the church networks by providing regular subsidies. During the ensuing 60 years there was a steady decline in church-going and membership, and hence of funding for church schools. So by the 1940s there were complaints that the church schools were inferior to the government ones because of their comparative poverty.

At this point the system was reformed by Rab Butler, a name fellow fossils will remember. The government took responsibility for all the running costs of church schools, but the churches kept the right to appoint schools' boards of governors.

This was the arrangement with which colonial officials were familiar when Hong Kong got around to providing an education system. The religious-schools landscape, though, was rather different. In the UK, church schools traditionally catered for the children of members. In Hong Kong, this was not the case.

For many years, people in the US, and occasionally in other places, received calls from God to go to China to convert its inhabitants to the joys of Christianity. After 1949, foreign visitors with this purpose in mind were no longer welcome on the mainland. However, God's personnel department was still sending out the calls, so recipients tended to find their way to Hong Kong, which had the necessary population of heathen Chinese, functional sewers and freedom of religion.

So Hong Kong was kitted out with a very large number of religious schools, the purpose of which was not to cater to converts but to increase their number. These schools provide a much-needed service, but the arrangements for their government are anomalous. In the 1870s - or even the 1940s - in the UK, a board of governors chosen by the local branch of the Church of England could be expected to be representative of the parents of the pupils and the community they came from. Religious schools in the UK are still expected to cater for children of the relevant religion.

There have been some cases in which parents living near particularly desirable church schools had suspiciously well-timed bouts of religious enthusiasm, but in principle the pupils are being instructed by their own church members.

But in Hong Kong none of this happens because the religious schools are willing and indeed eager to recruit people of other religions in the hope that they can be persuaded to see the error of their ways. This is a bit rough on pupils who already have a perfectly good religion of their own.

It is difficult to do anything about this because the teachers concerned sincerely believe they are saving their pupils from perdition and the boards of governors are still dominated by church members who probably think this a good idea. Some are probably quite keen on intelligent design as well.

It seems that we now have a surplus of secondary schools. One of the more interesting offerings in last week's Post was the news that precarious schools were offering generous free gifts for new first-year students in an effort to keep their numbers up.

This is an opportunity to abandon the Darwinian approach that seems to be favoured by the education mandarins, in which survival is decided by the number of students joining the school each year. Instead, we could try to redesign the system so that it matches student needs more closely.

Religious education may be important, but then it should be provided in the student's religion, not that of the teacher or his school's board of governors. And if we don't have the guts for pruning, could we at least be more discriminating about new foundations? Hong Kong does not need any more church schools.