Hong Kong secondary schools should make national security education an independent subject in their respective curricula, the head of a local secondary school proposed on Friday.
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Tang Fei, principal of Hong Kong’s Heung To Secondary School (Tseung Kwan O), said it should also include China’s Constitution, the city’s Basic Law, and some basic legal knowledge in order to cultivate law-abiding residents and give young people a better understanding of the law.
In an exclusive interview with China Daily, the veteran educator said Hong Kong has an urgent need to have such education, as the rule of law of the city was seriously undermined by the “Occupy Central” illegal protest in 2014 and last year’s social unrest.
Tang Fei, principal of Hong Kong’s Heung To Secondary School (Tseung Kwan O) said Hong Kong has an urgent need to have such education, as the rule of law of the city was seriously undermined by the “Occupy Central” illegal protest in 2014 and last year’s social unrest
Tang’s suggestions came after Secretary for Education Kevin Yeung Yun-hung said on Thursday that the Education Bureau is drafting textbooks and syllabuses related to national security education. The education chief earlier said the Education Bureau will consider how to incorporate National Security Law education into schools’ curricula.
In the opinion of Tang, who is also a member of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macao Studies, making it an independent subject could avoid the same problem that city schools have had teaching national education, which has failed after its elements were divided and blended into different subjects.
Similar arrangements have been made for Basic Law education, where you see Liberal Studies teachers sometime touch upon contents related to the Basic Law in their class, he said. “What happened last year has shown national education failed in Hong Kong, and it proved the teaching method doesn’t work”, Tang said. “We need to learn a lesson from past experience.”
If it can be a separate subject, the Education Bureau must set up a task force comprising professionals from both legal and educational sectors, Tang said. They should cooperate to provide professional training to teachers who are responsible for corresponding lessons, devise the subject’s syllabus, relevant textbooks and teaching materials, and properly put legal knowledge into schools’ curricula so that it’s easy for primary and secondary students to comprehend, he said.
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Tang said that the participation of legal experts is important as the awkward issue is that most schools have no teachers who are capable of providing an accurate and easy-to-understand explanation of the National Security Law to students.
Tang suggested the government introduce what he would like to call “civic education” into the city’s upcoming Policy Address slated for October. He estimated that the subject will be gradually completed and accessible to all students within two to three years as long as the government is determined to do it.
Tang believed when a holistic “civic education” is in place, it will mitigate the city’s overpoliticized Liberal Studies, which has been blamed for the high number of youngsters who have participated in the city’s yearlong civil unrest.
The issue with the city’s much-criticized Liberal Studies, in Tang’s eyes, is it has in the course of implementation, out of nowhere, gradually put more emphasis on “humanities” and neglected the “science” part to a point now that “only politics matters” in the subject.
“It is not in line with the original course guidelines, but somehow during the examination process, this is how the exam questions were set,” Tang said.
So the simplest way to solve this problem is to adjust the subject and design the exam questions in accordance with the original course guidelines, he added.
