The mandatory use of mother tongue education in Hong Kong after 1997 met strong objections from the local community. While the government put forward a comprehensive educational agenda to justify the implementation of the policy, this paper raises the question of whether the change in language policy was mainly driven by an educational agenda, or whether there were other underlying agendas. To address the question, the history of the medium of instruction in Hong Kong is reviewed, and the experience of three decolonised Asian countries, Malaysia, Singapore and India, is discussed. The paper suggests that the political agenda has always played an important role in language policy formulation and implementation. In view of the important role that language plays in nation building and social reconstruction, it is inevitable that Chinese medium instruction will become more and more important. How the government will balance the need to strengthen the national identity of Hong Kong people and the need to maintain the international out look and economic development of Hong Kong will have a major impact on there view of the new medium of instruction policy in 2001.
[Copyright of Language, Culture and Curriculum is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908319908666578]

The initiatives for educational effectiveness experienced 3 waves of movements. Each wave had its own paradigm in conceptualizing the nature of education and its effectiveness and formulating related initiatives for improvement of educational practice in the classroom. This article aims to discuss how the conceptualization and characteristics of the effective classroom are changed with the paradigm shift from the traditional site-bounded paradigm toward the new Contextualized Multiple Intelligences (CMI)-triplization paradigm. With the support of empirical data, the profiles of effective and ineffective classrooms in the 1st and 3rd waves are mapped and discussed, and some implications are drawn for research and development of a new type of classroom effectiveness.
[Copyright of School Effectiveness and School Improvement is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09243450802535174]

Following initiations in educational reform that began in the 1990s, Hong Kong continues to experience considerable pressure for educational reform. On the surface many of these initiatives parallel reform policies/movements in Asia and indeed, globally. The success of any reform is dependent on how it is contextualised prior to and at implementation. In this article, an exploration is made into how reforms in four particular sareas, namely: professional development of principals, higher education, English language standards, and inclusion of students with learning difficulties have been conceived, contextualised and managed in Hong Kong, as it moves gradually toward increased adoption of education reforms. These areas are linked in that each describes and critiques contextualization with reference to areas such as accountability, co-operation and professional control.
[Copyright of Education Policy Analysis Archives is the property of College of Education, Arizona State University.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/]

Hong Kong has put forward a package of education reform proposals in 2000. The education reform is to set the blueprint for Hong Kong's development of education for the 21st century. An analysis of the values orientation of the reform proposals shows that the impact of globalization and the economic restructuring are the guiding forces. The main concern of the education reform is human investment - to produce the manpower demanded by a new economy of the era of information technology. At the same time, the proposals also promote democratization and equal opportunities and this implies a paradigm shift.
[Copyright of School Effectiveness and School Improvement is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1076/sesi.15.2.201.30431]

This article examines colonial language policies and practices at the government Central School, Hong Kong - the so-called Eton of the East - in the second half of the nineteenth century. The article, which draws on a range of unpublished primary sources, seeks to enhance our knowledge of an important episode in Hong Kong's educational history and, in so doing, illuminate our understanding of British attitudes towards the learning and use of English in the empire. The article is divided into three main sections. The first section analyses the nature and purposes of the scheme to 'centralise' government-sponsored English teaching in a flagship school in the early 1860s. The second section investigates the roles of the English and Chinese languages in the colonial curriculum and the approaches to the teaching of English adopted by the school's founding Headmaster, Frederick Stewart. The final section examines the reform of the Central School in the late nineteenth century.
[Copyright of Language and Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/le744.0]

After sketching in the background for conversation generally about theoretical and methodological issues in comparative education and more specifically about its historical dimension, the author seeks to identify theories that, despite widespread eclecticism and even support for atheoretical standpoints, appear influential, together with characteristic forms of historical analysis. With these preliminaries as a basis, he analyses strategies for clarifying the historical dimension. This leads him to focus both on the units/levels of comparison and on three structures that can be used for this purpose: the familiar (narrative) forms of diachronic analysis, the more in-depth approaches opened up by synchronic analysis, and hybrid forms. The article also recognizes and explores problems associated with the use of the historical dimension, emphasizing those related to sources, interpretation, and periodization, while illustrating these problems and their possible solutions with specific examples from Hong Kong and elsewhere in the world. The article concludes by reaffirming the importance of the historical dimension of comparative education.
[Copyright of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03050060500073231]