School guidance seeks to promote the whole person growth of students. It is regarded as an integral part of an educational programme. In Hong Kong secondary schools, a team of teachers are responsible for school guidance. This article examines how guidance teachers made sense of their caring work in general and specifically the counselling services they offered to students. With the use of a narrative analysis and personal experience methods, the study explores the experience of guidance teachers in counselling. Twelve in-service teachers who had enrolled in the Postgraduate Diploma in Education programme at the Hong Kong Institute of Education were interviewed. The influence of the Chinese philosophy of Confucianism, emerging as a theme from the data, was prominent, as its key principles were incorporated into the teachers' personal systems of counselling. The findings illuminate the influence of Chinese culture in Hong Kong schools. Implications for the promotion of culturally responsive approaches to counselling and culturally competent practices for helping are discussed.
[Copyright of British Journal of Guidance & Counselling is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03069880802088929]

Since 1997, Hong Kong's reintegration with China has been founded on the principle of 'One Country, Two Systems', which serves to guarantee the sustainability of the capitalist system in Hong Kong under the rule of the socialist motherland. This paper is an intra-cultural and inter-regional comparative study of the curricula of two systems (socialist and capitalist) under one country, using the junior secondary History curricula in Shanghai and Hong Kong as a case study. In addition to tracing the differences and similarities, divergences and convergences in the junior secondary History curricula of the two systems, the paper also generates proposals for the future improvement of History education in both cities.
[Copyright of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0305006042000274836]

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 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.
[Copyright of Language and Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500780408666891]