tim's experiment

I see Alex Lo has got a nice demagogic thing going with the suggestion that complaints about the shortage of international school places should be ignored and expat kids should go to local schools. This is a result of not understanding the problem.

The business people who complain about the shortage of international school places are not concerned about long-term foreign residents, or their children. Actually most foreigners whose kids are born in Hong Kong are quite happy to experiment with the local system and sincerely hope their kids will be bilingual. This does not usually end in complete success but that is another story.

The scenario which bothers the business people goes like this. Master of Universe George Greed is employed by an international company in New York. He is American; his kids are American. Until his employer decided it wanted his services in Hong Kong he had no connection with the place. Nobody in the family speaks Chinese and the kids are in the New York school system. Mr Greed’s posting in Hong Kong is initially for two years. Afterwards — he will not be told until much later — the family may return to New York, or be sent somewhere else in the world.  Mrs Greed is not consulted about any of this. She will continue to call New York home and loyally follow her husband whereever he goes, nurturing the profound hope that the next stop on the itinerary will not be Somalia or Syria. The kids — there is an extensive academic literature on this — are going to grow up a bit confused.

This family’s educational requirements cannot be met by telling them that they are free to use Hong Kong’s excellent public school system. Even if it has one. What they require is a school which operates the American curriculum, or one close to it, so that the kids will not be behind when they start here and will not be behind again when they get back home. If Mr Greed were British he would require a different school, one which operated the British system. And so on. This is why we have international schools in a variety of different flavours.

This is the problem which bothers the Chamber of Commerce people. Hong Kong has plenty of international schools, but they are full of locals. As a result Mr Greed and his counterparts from other countries are deterred from coming here because they must either leave the kids behind or let them drop out of education altogether while they wait for a suitable place. Local schools intended for local residents do not cater successfully for members of ethnic minorities who speak Cantonese but do not write Chinese. They do not want and could not handle an influx of gwai-jais with entirely foreign educational backgrounds.

So what is to be done? Clearly there will be bitter complaints if we try to make it harder for local students to attend international schools. The ESF is already routinely accused of racism because of its policy of giving priority to people who can be educated in English. Encouraging more international schools is a hard sell. There are no easy answers.

One of the reasons why there are no easy answers is because this topic attracts demagogues peddling populist solutions based on a misunderstanding of the problem.

A few drops of the milk of human kindness would also not come amiss. I quote Mr Lo: “The American Chamber of Commerce has reported that the shortage is most acute on Hong Kong Island. Well try Kowloon or the New Territories!” Has Mr Lo no children? However rich a kid’s parents may be, do we really want to sentence it to a return trip from – say – Repulse Bay to Shatin every day to go to school? Would you wish that on a seven-year-old: two hours, three tunnels, pollution, tedium? Of course as she gets older she will have plenty of time to read pieces in the South China Morning Post explaining that the shortage of international school places is an illusion…