Language and the history of colonial education: The case of Hong Kong

Modern Asian Studies

Volumn 41, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 1-40

  Sweeting, Anthony ^a   Vickers, Edward ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COLONIAL LEGACY; COLONIZATION; EDUCATION; EDUCATION POLICY; EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; LANGUAGE; LITERACY;

AFRICA; ASIA; CHINA; EURASIA; FAR EAST; HONG KONG; NIGERIA; SOUTH ASIA; SRI LANKA; SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA; WEST AFRICA;

EID: 33845538767     PISSN: 0026749X     EISSN: 14698099     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X04001635     Document Type: Article

References (149)

1. Judith M. Brown and William Roger Louis (eds), The Twentieth Century. The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 706.
2. As noted below, much of the research that has been done on colonial education has been conducted by 'educationalists' - e.g. Philip G. Altbach and Gail P. Kelly (eds), Education and the Colonial Experience (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1984)
3. Stephen Ball, 'Imperialism, Social Control and the Colonial Curriculum in Africa', in Ivor Goodson and Stephen Ball (eds), Defining the Curriculum(London: Falmer, 1984)
4. Keith Watson (ed.), Education in the Third World (London: Croom Helm, 1982)
5. Clive Whitehead, 'Education in Far Away Places: Evidence from the Periphery of the Empire of the Problems of Developing Schooling in British Colonies', Education Research and Perspectives, 16, 1 (1989), 51-69.
6. Martin Carnoy, Education as Cultural Imperialism (New York: Longman, 1977).
7. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth Penguin, 1978 - and 2nd edition, 1995)
8. and Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto andWindus, 1993), much Indian writing on the cultural impact of colonialism - as well as the 'Subaltern Studies' project
9. also works such as Partha Chatterjee's Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986).
10. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, The British in India (Princeton University Press, 1996)
11. and An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987) However, it should be noted that much work by Cohn, Cannadine and others on the relationship between culture and imperialism - and 'power' and 'knowledge' in the imperial context - has owed nothing to Foucauldian 'discourse theory'.
12. See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
13. See Orientalism, 6-7 and Culture and Imperialism, 56-9.
14. Dominic Strinati. An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 166.
15. Orientalism, 7.
16. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 112.
17. Alastair Pennycook, English and the Discourses of Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1998)
18. and 'Language Policy as Cultural Politics: The Double-Edged Sword of Language Education in Colonial Malaya and Hong Kong', Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 17, 2 (1996), 133-52.
19. In a 'companion article', we intend to deal with questions concerning the history of the history curriculum in Hong Kong, together with questions about its possible role in the cultural alienation of students. See Vickers and Sweeting (forthcoming).
20. Pennycook (1998), 25.
21. Ibid., 27.
22. See, for example, A.W. March, 'The Place of English in Education in China'. The Chinese Recorder XLVI (Feb. 1915), 108-21
23. Herbert H House, 'English in Education in China', The Chinese Recorder XLVII (Feb. 1916 : 98-103
24. and Gertrude Howe, 'Teaching English in Girls' Schools', Records of the Triennial Meeting of the Educational Association of China. (Shanghai, 1893), 151-4.
25. Pennycook (1998), 113.
26. Ibid., 117ff.
27. Cited in Pennycook (1998: 123) fromCO129/489: 455-6.
28. B.H.K. Luk, 'Chinese Culture in the Hong Kong Curriculum', Comparative Education Review, 35 (1991): 650-68.
29. Pennycook (1998: 124). Italics inserted by present authors.
30. Ibid., 105.
31. Ibid., 95-128.
32. Ibid., 108.
33. Ibid., 102.
34. Ibid., 194.
35. Kingsley Bolton, Chinese Englishes: A Sociolinguistic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). In press.
36. Kingsley Bolton, 'Language and Hybridization: Pidgin Tales from the China Coast', Interventions 2(1) (2000): 35-52
37. 'Chinese Englishes: From Canton Jargon to Global English', World Englishes (July 2002), 21, 2, 181-199.
38. Anthony Sweeting, 'Snapshots from the Social History of Education in Hong Kong: An Alternative to Macro-Mania', Education Research and Perspectives, 16, 1 (June 1989), 3-12.
39. It is perhaps worth remembering that the very first example of national educational standardisation in Britain - the institution of civil service examinations in the 1860s - was inspired by Chinese precedent. It is no trivial coincidence that Whitehall civil servants have traditionally been referred to as 'mandarins'.
40. Andy Green, Education and State Formation (London: Macmillan, 1990).
41. William Cobbett, A Grammar of the English Tongue (1818), 14-15.
42. Chinese Repository, XII (July 1843), 362.
43. The institution referred to here was the Morrison Education Society School, which, its first and only headmaster, the American Samuel Brown, moved from its original home in Macau to Hong Kong in 1843. For further information on Brown and his school, see Anthony Sweeting, Education in Hong Kong, Pre-1841 to 1941 Fact and Opinion (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1990,) 20-2, 143, 146, 161-7.
44. Council of World Mission (CWM) Archives, G4, Box 5: Letter from Legge, 29th January, 1850. Legge, who became a very accomplished Sinologue, later translated the Chinese Classics into English, aided by the Chinese scholar and radical, Wang Tao.
45. See Paul A. Cohen, Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang Tao and Reform in Late Ch'ing China (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1974).
46. e.g., Friend of China, 7th December 1850, 387
47. China Mail, 1st May 1867, 2.
48. In the former, a conclusion was that 'the much desired plan of imparting Christian knowledge to Chinese adults in their own language (leaving them to instruct their children) may be deemed the most advisable after all'. In the latter, the editor commented that the basic cause of Legge's failure in the field of formal religious education in Hong Kong was that an English-language education provided Chinese students with a knowledge that raised them above the mass of their fellow countrymen and enabled them to obtain secular employment that paid much more than a religious vocation could earn.
49. Cited in E.J. Eitel, 'Materials for a History of Education in Hong Kong', The China Review, XIX, 5 (1890-91), 322.
50. Report of the 1847 Education Committee, reproduced in Wilhelm Lobscheid (1859), A Few Notices on the Extent of Chinese Education and the Government Schools of Hong Kong (Hong Kong, printed at the China Mail Office), 19-22.
51. The successor to the 1847 committee of enquiry was, significantly enough, given the designation, 'Committee for Superintending Chinese Education' (emphasis added by present authors), as is evinced in all of its annual reports, 1848-1858.
52. Eitel, op. cit., 322.
53. A more general reference to these prizes appears in Committee for Superintending Chinese Schools (1853), Report for 1852, para. 7.
54. Ironically for Pennycook's argument, the authorship of these rules is commonly attributed to Legge, a person he considers to be a champion of cultural imperialism and the teaching of English.
55. For evidence to support this claim, see Editorial in the China Mail, 27th March, 1873, 3
56. Eitel (1876: 24)
57. Helen Edith Legge, James Legge: Missionary and Scholar (London: Religious Tract Society, 1905), 203, 204ff.
58. Mary D. Legge, 'James Legge', unpublished paper read to the Sino-Scottish Society of the University of Edinburgh, 1951, 9
59. Lindsay Ride, 'Biographical Note' in The Chinese Classics, Volume 1 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), 10-22
60. Lauren Pfister, 'Clues to the Life and Academic Achievement of One of the Most Famous Nineteenth Century European Sinologists', Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 30, (1993), 200f
61. Man-kwong. Wong, James Legge: A Pioneer at the Crossroads of East and West (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Educational Publishing Company, 1996), 81, 127-130. Legge's Orientalist credentials (in the original, non-Said-influenced meaning of the term) included his translation of the Confucian Classics, his friendship with Wang Tao, and his long tenure as the first incumbent in the Chair of Chinese at Oxford University.
62. Subsequently renamed, briefly, Victoria College and then Queen's College.
63. Hong Kong Government Gazette, 1861, 107.
64. See, for example, Hong Kong Blue Book, 1865, Annual Report on the State of the Government Schools for the Year 1865, 277.
65. That he remained convinced of the difficulty Chinese students experienced when learning English and of the temptations for them to leave school before they had mastered the language but after they could pick up an acquaintance with the language is illustrated by the comments he made in a letter to the British Colonial Office in 1878. See Sweeting, Fact and Opinion (1990), 233.
66. Hong Kong Blue Book, 1865: 277.
67. Sweeting, Fact and Opinion (1990), 231-2. Primary sources providing evidence to support this view include the dispatch from Hennessy to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 27th January, 1878, in CO129/181, 133ff.
68. Sir John Pope Hennessy to the Earl of Carnarvon, 27 January, 1878; in CO129/181, 133ff.
69. Hong Kong Government Gazette, 9th March, 1978, 90. The Commander of British Troops, the Colonial Secretary, the Surveyor-General and one non-official voted for the Hennessy-inspired proposal, whereas two non-officials who were prominent businessmen voted along with Frederick Stewart to make the study of Chinese compulsory. It might also be noted that, although the Conference voted unanimously for the idea of the Central School devoting 'more time' each school-day 'to English and less time to Chinese studies', it did so explicitly in order that the new situation would be 'without diminishing the amount of Chinese knowledge on the part of the scholars on leaving the school'.
70. Report of the Education Commission, 1882, 1-2.
71. Pennycook (1998), 43-4.
72. Ibid., 143.
73. For examples of Brown's efforts on behalf of Chinese students in Hong Kong, see Carl T. Smith, Chinese Christians: Elites, Middlemen and the Church in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1985), 13-33.
74. For his efforts on behalf of three of his Hong Kong students whom he took back with him and helped educate in the United States in the late 1840s, see Sweeting, Fact and Opinion, 20-1 and n. 36.
75. This fact does not fit the 'linguistic imperialism' interpretation since, as already noted, Stewart was consistently a strong supporter of his students' need for a firm foundation in Chinese culture, studies, and language. He was also one of three members of the 1878 Education Conference who dissented from Hennessy's proposal to make the study of Chinese at the Central School 'optional, at the declaration of the parents'.
76. T.C. Cheng, 'The Education of the Overseas Chinese - A Comparative Study of Hong Kong, Singapore and the East Indies', unpublished M.A. thesis, University of London (1949), 123-5.
77. For the activities of the Directors of the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals, see Elizabeth Sinn, Power and Charity: The Early History of the Tung Wah Hospital (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1989), 69-71.
78. The schools established by the Tung Wah Directors were probably the best-known, but other Chinese-medium schools founded in the later 19th or very early 20th Century include those influenced by the reform movement, the revolutionary movement, and the upsurge in nationalism during the late Qing period, as well as those sponsored by the Ellis Kadoorie Chinese Schools Society and other, smaller voluntary societies. Pennycook's reliance on secondary sources ensures that he was unaware of evidence from annual reports on education by the inspector of schools, which emphasized the predominance of Chinese-medium schooling in Hong Kong during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. For example, the Report on Education for the year 1882 includes the statements, 'Of the 80 schools under Government supervision, there is but a small minority teaching English. The vast majority of the children in the Colony learn Chinese only'.
79. the Report (1887), para. 6
80. and the Report (1893), para. 8. None of these supports Pennycook's assumptions and rhetoric.
81. Sweeting, Fact and Opinion (1990), 76-7. 293.
82. Pennycook (1998), 143.
83. Among other critical comments and referring directly to the Education Committee's proposal to focus on the thorough (and English-medium) education of a Chinese elite rather than 'more widely spread education', Chamberlain noted approvingly that a former Registrar-General in Hong Kong had laid down that 'the first duty is to maintain Vernacular schools' and continued, 'certainly, it would need very strong grounds to justify withholding Government assistance from Vernacular education in a large native community such as exists in Hong Kong, thereby presumably excluding the very poorest from the benefits of education.' The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, to the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Henry Blake, 12th September 1902; in CO129/311, 48ff.
84. See, for example, Mee-yin Fong, The First Hundred Years of Hong Kong Education (Xianggang zao qi jiao yu fa zhan Shi: 1842-1941) (Hong Kong: Zhongguo xue she (China Studies Society) in Chinese, 1975), 68-74 and 139-44
85. Hei-tak Wu, 'Education as a Business', Hongkong University Education Journal 11 (Jan. 1939), 36
86. T.C. Cheng, 'Changes in Local Vernacular Schools'. Hongkong University Education Journal 11 (Jan. 1939), 50
87. Sweeting, Fact and Opinion, (1990), 290-3.
88. Pennycook (1998), 144.
89. See Sweeting, Fact and Opinion (1990), 236-7. Wu Ting-fang was an adviser to Li Hung-chang and twice Chinese ambassador to the United States
90. see, also, Linda Pomerantz-Zhang, Wu Tingfang: Reform and Modernization in Modern Chinese History, (Hong Kong, 992), 26-40
91. Carl T. Smith, Chinese Christians, 148, 198.
92. The secondary source that Pennycook cites is Peter Wesley-Smith, 'Anti-Chinese Legislation in HongKong', in Ming K. Chan (ed.), Precarious Balance: Hong Kong Between China and Britain (Hong Kong, 1994), 99. The statement about Ho Tung's three residences on the Peak appears on the same page. Perhaps it should also be noted that, when the newly-founded Peak (primary) School was declared to be reserved for children of Europeans, Ho Tung complained and secured an explicit exception from this ruling for his own children (although, once had had secured this exception, he declined to make use of it).
93. Pennycook (1998), 145-7.
94. Governor of Hong Kong to Governor General, Canton, 20th January 1909.
95. Cited in Bernard Mellor, Lugard in Hong Kong: Empires, Education and a Governor at Work (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1992), 172ff.
96. Luk, 'Chinese Culture in the Hong Kong Curriculum', 1991, 659.
97. Numerous references to 'babus' are to be found in the works of Kipling (e.g. Kim).
98. Anthony Sweeting, A Phoenix Transformed; the Reconstruction of Education in Post-War Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1993), 72-5.
99. Anthony Sweeting and Paul Morris, 'Educational Reform in Post-war Hong Kong: Planning and Crisis Intervention', International Journal of Educational Development, 13, 3 (1993), 201-16.
100. See Watson and Whitehead, op. cit.
101. See also Philip Foster, Education and Social Change in Ghana (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 167
102. and J.S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India, 2nd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1956).
103. Sweeting, Phoenix Transformed (1993), 75.
104. Ibid., 115-16. The dramatic increase was caused partly by the population influx generated by economic and political problems in China and partly by the post-war 'baby boom', a local version of the international demographic trend.
105. See Luk, op. cit. (also cited by Pennycook in English and the Discourses of Colonialism).
106. Anthony Sweeting, 'The Reconstruction of Education in Post-War Hong Kong, 1945-1954: Variations in the Process of Education Policy Making'. Ph.D. dissertation (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong, 1989), 834-46.
107. Committee on Higher Education (1952), Report, 2-3
108. see, also, Sweeting, 'Reconstruction of Education in Post-war Hong Kong' (1989), 902-24.
109. See, for example, Sweeting, 'Reconstruction of Education in Post-war Hong Kong' (1989), 905-9.
110. John Francis Cramer,'The Chinese Colleges of Hong Kong', Comparative Education Review, III, 1 (1959), 26-9
111. Cho-yeeTo, 'The Development of Higher Education in Hong Kong', Comparative Education Review, IX, 1 (1965), 74-80
112. Sweeting (1989), 846-62.
113. Sweeting, 'Reconstruction of Education in Post-war Hong Kong' (1989). 979-1006.
114. The Evening School of Higher Chinese Studies could not accommodate the numbers of students envisaged and efforts by Americans to establish a university in Hong Kong were regarded by British and Hong Kong officials as unnecessarily confrontational with China. See, also, Sweeting, 'Reconstruction', 971-8.
115. It is not surprising to find, in the Cold War context of the early 1950s, that one of the options considered (but dismissed by the colonial government, largely for reasons of territoriality) was a proposal by Americans to establish an American University in Hong Kong (Sweeting, 'Reconstruction' (1989), 862-7, 971-9).
116. This was known as the 'Special Classes Centre' scheme, strongly espoused by L.G. Morgan, then Deputy Director of Education. It was implemented from 1955 in Clementi Middle School, the Government's own 'flag-ship' school for vernacular education.
117. Alice N.H. Lun, 'The Founding', in Alice N.H. Lun (ed.), The Quest for Excellence: A History of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1994), 3-33
118. Anthony Sweeting, 'Education Policy Making in Hong Kong, 1995-1991', unpublished Research Report produced for the Education and Manpower Branch of the Government Secretariat, Government of Hong Kong, 1996, 29-157.
119. Colonial Office minute by W.I.J. Wallace, 16th March, 1959, and Wallace to Melville, 5th May, 1959 (in CO1030/572)
120. R. McC. Andrew, Foreign Office, to M. McMullen, Colonial Office, 28th August, 1959 (in CO1030/900).
121. Report of the Board of Education on the Proposed Expansion of Secondary School Education in Hong Kong over the Next Decade, Hong Kong (August 1973), 6.
122. As noted below, protests did indeed erupt in late 1997 when the government decided to force the majority of local secondary schools to switch to 'mother-tongue' instruction.
123. Ordinance 10/74: Hong Kong Government Gazette Legal Supplement 1, 116, A.37-8.
124. Cheng Ngai Lung, Shek Kang Chuen, Tse Ka Kui, and Wong Siu Lun, At What Cost? Instruction through the English Medium in Hong Kong Schools, privately published pamphlet (June 1973). One of the authors, while emphasising the local influences upon his thinking at the time, acknowledged that the international climate had also played a part (Interview with Professor Wong Siu Lun, 19 June, 2002).
125. E.g., the Panel of Visitors declared, 'We... accept as a fact that the mother tongue is, all other things being equal, the best medium of teaching and learning. There are sound political, cultural and psychological reasons to support the proposition.' (John Llewellyn, chair, A Perspective on Education in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Government, 1982), 28).
126. A number of commentators, including one of the present authors, have considered that a form of 'applied de-colonization' and perhaps even the spread of post-colonial attitudes well before the formal change of sovereignty in mid-1997. See, for example, Sui-Kai Lau, Decolonization without Independence: The Unfinished Political Reforms of the Hong Kong Government (Hong Kong, Institute of Social Research Center, 1987)
127. Anthony Sweeting, 'Education within Historical Processes', in Gerard A. Postiglione (ed.), Education and Society in Hong Kong: Toward One Country and Two Systems (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1992), 45-6
128. Anthony Sweeting, 'Hong Kong', in Paul Morris and Anthony Sweeting (eds), Education and Development in East Asia (New York: Garland, 1995), 63.
129. The Tiananmen Square Massacre of June 4, 1989, though it had a massive impact on the broader political scene in Hong Kong, had no direct discernible impact on the government's medium of instruction policy. However, since one of the legacies of June 4 was a greater official sensitivity to public concerns, it may if anything have reinforced reluctance on the part of the Education Department to venture any radical initiatives in the controversial area of language teaching in schools.
130. David C.K. Cheung's school, originally known as Carmel English School, switched to mother tongue teaching and learning in 1988. Because of its perceptions of a decline in the academic standards of the student intake, the Carmel School Council insisted on a return to English-language instruction in 1990. This led to Mr. Cheung's resignation. See, for example, SCMP, 6th October, 1986, 27, and 16th June, 1990, 2
131. David C.K. Cheung, 'WhyMother-Tongue', in Anthony Sweeting (ed.), Differences and Identities: Educational Argument in Late Twentieth Century Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, 1990), 73-9
132. David W.C. So, 'Language-based Bifurcation of Secondary Schools in Hong Kong: Past, Present and Future', in K.K. Luke (ed.), Into the Twenty-first Century: Issues of Language Education in Hong Kong(Hong Kong: Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, 1992), 83.
133. M.A. Brimer (ed.), 'The Effects of the Medium of Instruction on the Achievement of Form 2 Students in Hong Kong Secondary Schools' (Hong Kong, December 1985). This report received only a very limited form of publication, mainly in senior government circles and, at the insistence of the Education Department, was categorized as 'Restricted'. A copy is, however, shelved in the Hong Kong Collection of the University of Hong Kong's Library.
134. Early forms of positive discrimination included offering schools that adopted Chinese as their medium of instruction additional teachers and the introduction of a Native English Teacher (NET) scheme, by which teachers from English-speaking countries overseas were encouraged by terms of service more attractive than those applying to local teachers to teach English for a number of years in Hong Kong schools.
135. Sweeting (1991) 'Education within Historical Processes', in G.A. Postiglione & Y.M. Leung (eds), Education and Society in Hong Kong: Toward One Country and Two Systems, 57-8
136. 'Educational Policy, Social Change and Development in Hong Kong', in G.A. Postiglione & W.O. Lee (eds), Social Change and Educational Development: Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, (Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 1995), 237.
137. See Paul Morris and Ian Scott, 'Educational Reform and Policy Implementation in Hong Kong', Journal of Education Policy, Vol. 18 (2003), No. 1, 71-84.
138. For a more detailed account of the Precious Blood Golden Jubilee Secondary School 'Affair', see Anthony Sweeting and Paul Morris, 'Educational Reform in Post-war Hong Kong: Planning and Crisis Intervention', International Journal of Educational Development, 13, 3, 209-11.
139. Po King Choi, '"The best students will learn English": Ultra-utilitarianism and linguistic imperialism in education in post-1997 Hong Kong', Journal of Education Policy, November-December 2003, Vol. 18, No. 6, 673-694.
140. See Edward Vickers, In Search of an Identity: The Politics of History Education in Hong Kong, 1960s-2002 (New York, Routledge, 2003), Chapter 3.
141. D.A. Washbrook, 'Colonial Discourse Theory', in Robin W. Winks (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire Volume V, Historiography, 603.
142. The role of the 'Han nation' vis-à-vis China's various ethnic minorities (including Tibetans and Uigurs) has always been seen by Chinese nationalists very much in terms of a 19th-century style 'civilizing mission'. See Henrietta Harrison, China(London: Arnold, 2001).
143. Pennycook (1998), 150.
144. Ibid., 108.
145. See Edward Said, 'Orientalism Reconsidered', in Francis Barker and others (eds), Europe and its Others: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature (Colchester: Essex University, 1985)
146. also the epilogue to the 1995 edition of Orientalism. The confusions in Said's own stance are noted by Washbrook, op.cit., 600 ff.
147. A.G. Hopkins, 'Introduction: Globalization - An Agenda for Historians', in A.G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (London: Pimlico, 2002), 2.
148. Janina Brutt-Griffler, World Englishes: A Study of its Development (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2002), 63.
149. Ibid., viii, 64.