Students wearing face masks at Fresh Fish Traders' School in Tai Kok Tsui, Hong Kong, prepare for class to start, June 8, 2020. (CALVIN NG / CHINA DAILY)
Hong Kong educators called on the city’s education sector to come back to teaching and always put students’ interests first after the city’s largest teachers’ organization, the Hong Kong Professional Teachers’ Union, announced its disbandment on Tuesday.
The dissolution of the teachers’ union, which had over 90,000 members, came after the city’s Education Bureau announced last month it was cutting ties with the union, citing its role in inciting class boycotts and violence “under the guise of being a professional education organization”.
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An Education Bureau spokesperson said the dissolution of the Hong Kong Professional Teachers' Union would not affect the bureau’s work and it would continue to maintain close dialogue with teachers and principals in nurturing the younger generation of Hong Kong
Wong Kam-leung, chairman of the Hong Kong Federation of Education Workers, said that educational groups should always place the interests of students first.
Wong said that in its early years, the PTU served Hong Kong teachers and protected teachers’ rights and interests, but he felt sorry that the organization “gradually went on a wrong path and placed politics above others”.
The union had unshakable responsibility for the spread of separatism on campuses and the social unrest in 2019, Wong said.
The whole sector should learn from the disbandment of the union that all educators and educational organizations need to come back to educating the younger generation, instead of promoting political propaganda.
Education Convergence chairman Ho Hon-kuen attributed the disbanding of the union to its previous deeds. “The union should know better than anyone else why it folded,” Ho said.
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Hong Kong’s fate is closely intertwined with that of the nation, he said, and it needed to pay extra care to maintain that relationship if it wanted to move forward. Education was of primary importance in achieving that, Ho added.
He urged the education sector to work in solidarity to nurture the younger generation and build a better future for the city.
An Education Bureau spokesperson said the dissolution of the union would not affect the bureau’s work and it would continue to join hands with genuine education professional organizations, and maintain close dialogue with teachers and principals in nurturing the younger generation of Hong Kong.
In explaining the severing of ties with the union last month, a bureau spokesperson said the PTU had urged teachers to launch class boycotts, and that students and teachers swayed by the PTU had taken part in violent and unlawful activities over the past few years. The remarks and deeds of the PTU were invariably inconsistent with what was expected of the education profession, rendering it no different from a political body.
As a result, the bureau could no longer regard the PTU as a professional education body, the spokesperson said.
Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor voiced her support for the bureau’s decision this month. She said the PTU was supposed to unite teachers in Hong Kong and focus on education, but it had instead put politics before professional ethics and brought anti-government sentiments onto campuses.
