The year 2008 marked the 11th anniversary of Hong Kong's return from the UK to the People's Republic of China. In this decade, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government has repeatedly emphasised the importance of the development of national identity and patriotism in school education, and has at the same time introduced diverse cultural values into the school curriculum. This article explores the dynamics and complexity of the relationships between the state, globalisation and nationalism in Hong Kong that are re-shaping music education in response to contemporary socio-political changes. It argues that Hong Kong school music education has made a gradual cultural shift towards globalism and nationalism, and away from the Westernism that has dominated Hong Kong music education since before the change of sovereignty on 1 July 1997. The article concludes with a discussion of how music education might juggle two pairs of relationships in the curriculum: between global and national cultures; and between the education of cultural values and nationalism in Chinese music. There is pressure to rethink teacher education in terms of the need to be aware of the socio-political environment in which it operates, and within which it makes music education socially relevant.
[Copyright of Music Education Research is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14613800903390741]

Civic education has been idealized and assigned the mission of preparing critical thinking, responsible, participating, multidimensional citizens. But on the other hand, civic education is also charged with the responsibility of moralizing the citizens into characters like punctuality, obedience, docility, deference . It is also used to serve the function of nationalistic education: Instilling the sense of national identity , loyalty to the nation state and patriotism.
Many Asian countries have strong elements of nationalistic education in their civic education . In 1996, one year before the return of sovereignty of Hong Kong to Chinas, a new official Guidelines on Civic Education in Schools (1996), proposing a curriculum framework with equal emphasis on human rights education, education for democracy, education for rule of law, nationalistic education, global education and education for critical thinking was introduced by the Education Department, which is to be implemented in schools starting from September of 1996. After 1 July, 1997, there was a very strong pressure from the society, asking for more nationalistic education and more schools were taking the initiative to implement nationalistic education.
Does the the mission of civic education : preparing critical thinking, responsible, participating, multidimensional citizens, contradict with that of nationalistic education : instilling the sense of national identity , loyalty to the nation state and patriotism ? This paper attempts to construct a framework to study (1) whether there are contradiction and (2)whether the practice of nationalistic education in schools is different from that of civic education.
[Copyright of Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) at http://www.aare.edu.au]

Following the resumption of Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the Hong Kong Government has introduced a new national education project which aims at building nationalism and patriotism. With an active involvement of the state and civil society in promoting national education in recent years, there have been certain drastic changes in the school system - reforms in the curriculum with more weight to national identity and China's topics, more nationalistic or patriotic extra-curricular activities and rituals, and more training for teachers to conduct national education. Informed by a Gramscian notion of hegemony, this paper analyses the advent of and struggles over the national education policy and illustrates the collaboration and contests among various groups in the nation-building project - with the controversies over display of the national flag and liberal studies curriculum as examples.
[Copyright of International Studies in Sociology of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09620210701543908]