After the resumption of sovereignty in 1997 mother tongue education in Hong Kong, though it began with the good intention of national reintegration, politi-cally, socially, culturally and educationally, has escalated the tensions and contradic-tions of the politics of bilingualism in its implementation. The government policy of bi-literacy and trilingualism addresses, rather than resolves, the problems of hegemonic struggle among different social groups in the society, and between the indigenous elite class and national ruling elites at both the local and national level. A reproduction analysis is conducted to examine the events pertinent to the language shift of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) to Chinese as a medium of instruction (CMI), with particular emphasis on controversial issues such as parental choice, antagonism of elite classes, and group politics in the face of the internationalisation of English under globalised developments of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). English, a colonising language in the past and now a world language for changes in ICT, remains problematic for Hong Kong's language policy undergoing decolonisation and internationalisation in its early post-transitional years. Putonghua, the national lan-guage of China, challenging Cantonese, the regional dialect, as the formal and high Chinese language of the society, has added complexities to the discourse of polemical mother tongue education under the 'one country, two systems' framework practised in Hong Kong.
[Copyright of Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0305792032000107786]

This study critically examines Hong Kong's environmental education initiatives beyond schooling in the last 5 years with reference to the engagement of environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in this process under an emerging sponsorship regime. It highlights that the manifested form and mode of environmen-talism in general and environmental education in particular are embedded within the socio-political context of colonial governance, the proliferation of green ideas and the local adaptation of ideas of environmental education. It is observed and argued that environmental education programmes in the last 5 years, promoted mainly in the mass media domain, have been partially successful in changing people's perception on environmental affairs, but environmental groups' autonomy is questioned under a sponsorship regime. The paper ends with remarks on the future of environmental education under a new political regime in 1997 and beyond.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1350462980040303]

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]

This article examines the attitudes of the colonial and metropolitan governments towards the promotion of English-language education on Hong Kong Island between 1842 and 1860. The study, which draws on a range of unpublished primary sources, was conducted in response to Whitehead's recent call for detailed case studies of colonial education policies. This article explores, within the context of Hong Kong, a centrally important aspect of education in the Empire, and one that has been the subject of surprisingly little archival research: British policies towards the teaching and learning of English as a second language. The article begins by analysing the political, economic and demographic forces that influenced the study and use of English in Hong Kong during the 1840s and 1850s, and then moves on to examine language policies and practices in the colony's mission schools, with a particular focus on the Morrison Education Society School, the first Western school to be established on the Island after the British occupation. The final section analyses the introduction of English teaching in the government vernacular schools in the early 1850s.
[Copyright of History of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00467600600745395]

The use of students' second language as the medium of instruction in schools is quite common in former colonies of Western countries. Schools in Hong Kong have had this kind of experience for more than 150 years. In this study, three factors, namely economic, political, and educational, are found to affect the choice of medium of instruction in schools. In particular, the economic factor is found to be the dominant one for most of the time, while the educational factor has the smallest influence. Due to the change of the above three factors and their interactions over time, there were more Chinese-medium secondary schools in the first 100 years (1842-1949) and then more English-medium secondary schools during the transitional period 1950-97. However, the political factor suddenly becomes dominant after the change of sovereignty--there is an abrupt drop in English-medium secondary schools after government intervention in 1998. Educators should be more vocal and involved in politics in order to push the Government to make decisions that are educationally right.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500780408666891]

In the process of examining the recent and, especially, post-Handover, contributions that the Hong Kong Education Commission (EC) has made to policy concerning Continuing Education (CE) in the Special Administrative Region, the authors of this article were drawn into discussion of three underlying issues. These include the issue of conceptual clarity with regard to 'continuing education' and the operational implications of the local adoption of the fashionable worldwide mantra of 'lifelong learning'. They necessarily become involved in the need to distinguish between policy rhetoric, often employed in the form of Confucian-like exhortation, and practical applications of specific recommendations. They consider the extent to which the new polices have been implemented. While their analysis of policy process is, in an important sense, Hong Kong specific, it raises questions of international interest and concern, and this is probably most clearly manifested in the case study they offer of different arguments and proposals about the funding of CE.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0158037032000131529]