In accordance with the Education Commission's consultation paper "Learning for Life", life-long learning is the hinge of HKSAR's educational development in the new millenium. In the ever-changing world life-long learning is essential to keeping oneself competitive and employable. Teachers need to exemplify and cultivate the ethos of life-long learning among the students. Continuous teacher education is important as it helps reorientate Hong Kong's teachers to embrace a life-long learning attitude. In schools, adjustments and arrangements need to be worked out for continuous teacher education to be fruitful.

With a view to achieving quality school education (QES) with all its concomitant benefits, the Education Commission published a Consultation Document on the subject in November 1996. Public views were sought thereafter for two months and the final report is expected to come out in the near future. Generally speaking, the public found the recommendations contained in the Document positive and forward-looking. We strongly back the Commission's brave initiative in attempting to improving school education in Hong Kong. Of the various areas in which recommendations for improvement were made, we would like to focus our discussion on three of them, namely, the relationship between SMI and the development of quality school education, the requirements for schools to be economically efficient and quality assurance inspections. Through studying these three areas in greater detail, we hope that we will be in a better position to suggest some of the prerequisites for quality school education and ways to make schools more accountable to the general public.

School civic education has had the responsibility for developing local citizenship and shaping the role of S.A.R. citizens since the 1997 handover. An active citizenry is what a society aims to achieve in the development of modern citizenship. In the face of globalized competition and change, the future growth and development of a society rests greatly on innovative civic participation. The informal curriculum in Hong Kong schools provides a practice-based learning opportunity and milieu for participatory civic development. In examining the electoral participation of students' associations in schools, we can better understand civic learning in Hong Kong secondary schools. Apart from curriculum problems and difficulties, learning of participatory citizenship in school can help develop students' civic knowledge, skills and awareness. This article investigates participation in student union elections to find out how well participatory education is developed in Hong Kong secondary schools and discusses ways to develop civic education in Hong Kong schools.

Present day education requires professional expertise of teachers in facilitating modern learning, which enables students to cope with life changes brought forth by a learning society in the new era to come. Reform in school, which liberates teachers from bureaucratic practices and creates a new professional work culture is inevitable. Hong Kong schools now undergo quality school education reforms where organisational and school based management innovations are the focus of reform changes. The reform aims, among others, at enhancing professional involvement of teachers in school administration and curriculum for the sake of fostering the lifelong learning among students, a paradigm shift of learning in the learning society in the forthcoming Y2K. Observations however reveal that the profeesional role of Hong Kong school teachers does not change much as expected in recent policy reform papers on school education.

Since the political handover in 1997, there has been a chain of reform initiatives aiming at enhancing the quality of educational services in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Such episodes include the issuing of a report on quality school education measures, the promulgation of a new set of education aims and the impending education reform to bring forth life-long learning. Together these would substantially transform the landscape of education in Hong Kong. This paper aims at reviewing the changing lanscape of Hong Kong's education. Particularly, the paper would explore the following: 1) the degree of continuity and change as represented in the current development 2) the paradigm shift in education especially with respect to the meaning of learning, the role of teachers and schools and the sort of personality we want to build up for the future. At the end, the paper will also point out the potential risks we need to guard against in this change period.

Contrary to the belief that education would empower women to attain a higher degree of equality with men in the society, recent researches in the West tend to indicate that in schools male students are actually favored in the classroom. Sadker & Sadker (1985) found that in all grades and classes of primary schools in the District of Columbia boys dominated the classroom communication with the tacit approval of their teachers. Morgan & Dunn (1988) suggested that boys were more 'visible' in the classroom and were granted more academic leeway. Such bias is taken as one of the factors which contribute to the nurturing of gender characters that dovetail the roles of the two genders in the society. The present study was undertaken to reveal whether newcomers to the teaching profession in Hong Kong will be gender-biased in handling their classes and if so, how and also why. It is hoped that result of the interview will cast light on whether the curriculum of teacher education course should be restructured to enhance the gender-fairness of the student teachers who would soon become the pillar of the teaching profession.