The establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has brought about enormous structural, social, economical, political and cultural changes to society. The government, the public, and other parties concerned find the need to cope with the multi-faceted changes by reviewing the existing systems and policies as to provide information for improvement or reform, wherever necessary. Education is undoubtedly on the reform agenda. Art education, which forms part of the core curriculum of general education and plays a role for developing an all-round being, deserves due attention. This study intends to obtain a thorough picture on the changes of the philosophy and rationale of art education in the past forty years by a descriptive study on the aims of art education in the official art syllabi of junior secondary schools. The study finds that there is a paradigm shift in art education in Hong Kong: from emotional personal experience to the cognitive and affective learning; from a single dimension of educational aims to multi-dimensional; from mere personal development to personal development, socialization, economic productivity, and further learning.
[Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

Computer technology has become a vital element which takes part in almost every aspect of our lives. In visual art, it acts as media for studio art production, tools for learning instruction, and tools for classroom management. However, the development of computer assisted learning in Hong Kong is still in an initial stage. As an educator of art, it is part of my responsibilities to study on the potential and effectiveness of computer application in the learning and teaching of art. This case study research of a programme of teacher education aims to find out the competency and attitude of prospective art teachers towards computer assisted learning and teaching. Result can pave way for future development of computer application for art teaching and learning in teacher education and in primary schools in Hong Kong. New Technology and Art Education: Computer technologies have enormous potential and advantages in enhancing and expanding the way of teaching and learning art in schools. Pupils can experiment their ideas on the screen without fearing of making mistakes and can easily try out their ideas and visualize their images in mind (Mathieson, 1993). These playful and relaxed working processes are a vital avenue leading to creativity (Greh, 1990). In teaching, on-line computer images provide enormous images through the net with a relatively lower cost (Heise,1996). Manipulating images on the screen allows more flexibility in teaching art appreciation and criticism than using slides for presentation (Greh, 1990). With the use of computer, pupils can 'save' part of the process and teachers are free to involve in the interim of their work (Greh, 1990). Computer application provides alternative ways for learning. For example the extensive use of World Wide Web makes thousands of works from major museums uploaded to the Net and on CD ROM which provides means to ponder, confer, and analyze everything from the most obscure artists; and allows life-long art-based learning (

The establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has brought about enormous structural, social, economical, political and cultural changes to society. To cope with these multi-faceted changes, there is a need to review the existing systems and policies as to provide information for improvement or reform. Education is undoubtedly within the criteria for revision. Art education, that forms part of the core curriculum of general education, plays a role for developing an all-round being should invite certain amount of attention. This study tended to obtain a thorough picture on the changes of the philosophy and rationale of art education in the recent forty years by a descriptive study on the aims of art education in the official art syllabuses of junior secondary schools.

When educators and researchers are talking about, studying or applying IT in education in many parts of the world, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government launched a five-year IT education strategy. It aims at applying IT comprehensively across the curriculum that within ten years, all teachers and secondary 5 graduates will be able to work competently with IT tools. The strategy advocated a big step forward from the existing situation as most of the primary schools have not yet involved any elements of IT in their curriculum. This survey aimed to find out the teachers' readiness and attitude towards IT in art education in local primary schools.

Within the core curriculum of primary education, the standard of both Chinese and English, especially writing ability, has attracted much attention of educators, parents and the public. Experienced educationists involved in Chinese language teaching and assessment have an opinion that young people's abilities in reading and writing have dropped in recent years. It might be a consequence came along with compulsory education as there is a great increase of individual differences among pupils that makes teaching and learning very difficult. There is an urgent need to find ways to make up the gap and guarantee at least a minimum educational attainment of all pupils. As art is a core subject in primary schools in Hong Kong, this study aims to examine the effect of art appreciation in art lessons on Chinese writing ability in some primary 3 pupils in a Chinese community.