Sending children to school is a big issue to thousands of parents. In order to enroll a ‘desirable’ primary school, parents spend plenty of time in getting an application form and to prepare their children to take the grade one admission test. It seems that going to school is very significant in the eye of the parents; however, what is school really meant to children? This study which aims at describing the feelings and thoughts of children about school, interviewed with 54 students in three primary schools. Results show that most children like going to school due to the variety of school lives like meting friends during recesses. Lessons like physical education, arts and craft were very attractive. They also felt that going to school is necessary. Some children believed that the aim of study and the main role of being students was to achieve good results. As educators, we need to listen to children’s voices and examine their perspectives and opinions carefully because they would provide us with a remarkable reflection of how to run an ideal school.
[Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

Early childhood education in Hong Kong has developed rapidly in the recent years in Hong Kong. Nevertheless, in the past three decades, the social status of early childhood education and early childhood educators were low comparing with other educational sections. The recent growth in early childhood education in Hong Kong has raised the early childhood teachers’ teacher identity. Teacher identity is an explicit view of self as teacher (Franzak, 2002) and is continually being informed, formed and reformed over time (Cooper and Olson, 1996). It evolves over career stages (Huberman, 1993) and is shaped by different forces: background, school experience, school, reform, and political contexts (Datnow et al., 2000; Sachs, 2000). In this study, my intention is to discuss how these social phenomenon and educational policies enhance three early childhood teachers’ professional identity over three decades.

This study is the second phase of a long term evaluation exercise namely: An Evaluation of the 9-year Compulsory Education of Hong Kong. This research is planned to focus on the following areas to delineate the causes of students' learning problems which have not been addressed thoroughly and deeply enough during the first phase: A. the nature (selective vs. universal education) of the formal and instructional curriculum; B. teachers' knowledge and belief learned from teacher education institutions; C. classroom climate and students' cognitive and effective learning process.