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.]

In Hong Kong, except for Art and Craft and Physical Education, official approved school textbooks for pupils and handbooks for teachers are widely used in primary schools. When Art and craft primary teachers in Hong Kong plan for their lessons, they can only follow the official curriculum prepared by the Curriculum Development Council of the Education Department of Hong Kong. Thus, the official curriculum plays a very important role in guiding the primary Art and Craft teachers in planning their taught curriculum. In the first part of this chapter, a brief historical account on the introduction of art education in Hong Kong is given. Then, the chapter examines the developmental trend of the aims of the planned Hong Kong Primary Schools Art and Craft Curriculum from the 1950s to the 1990s. Finally, it discusses both the external and internal factors that influence the art education in Hong Kong.
[Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

Music teachers in Hong Kong schools are required to pay more attention to various forms of Chinese music after the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. This new emphasis gave rise to an additional dimension in the music curriculum as well as many teaching problems. For instance, teaching materials on Chinese music are found to be inadequate. Teachers of Chinese music needed more musical experience and training. Teaching methods of proven effectiveness in this area are also in short supply. And then there is the problem of over learning, as students are provided with considerable amount of information on both Western and Chinese music. A study was undertaken to develop an effective strategy to teach traditional Chinese music in the context of Hong Kong secondary schools. Experiments were designed to test three identified variables that are likely to affect the results of classroom teaching. The variables are: 1. teaching sequence, 2. proportion between information and direct music experience, and 3. degree of framing. However, the findings of the experiments are inconclusive. As a demonstration of the approaches to this study, the experiment involving two different teaching sequences is described in this paper.
[Copyright © 2003 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

Computer-based technology, a relatively recent innovation, has taken an important place in both teacher education and in school education. In music teacher education programs, since computer-based music technology has been included in Hong Kong, it is the concern of music teacher educators to know how well their student teachers are implementing what they have learnt, and whether what they have learnt are practical. This paper reports on an investigation of the perception of a class of music student teachers on the curriculum of a computer-based music technology course, the self evaluation of their standard after taking the course and how well they have applied the technology to their music teaching and learning. The data has been collected through a questionnaire administered to the students at the end of a music technology course and then a phone interview of these students when they were teaching in schools. The analysis of the data revealed situations encountered by these music teachers. Recommendations are made regarding further development of the computer-based music technology curriculum in the music teacher education programs.
[Copyright © 2003 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

The latest music syllabus for Form I - III was published in 1983. It has been put into practice for more than fifteen years. To review the syllabus, the Curriculum Development Institute conducted in 1998 a survey on its implementation. A special meeting of music experts was also organized to examine the future trends of music education of Hong Kong. In anticipation of the revision of the syllabus, this chapter aims at reviewing the music contents stated in the syllabus and discussing the reform implications for teachers, students, schools heads, policy makers, and music teacher educators.
[Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]