Former high-ranking officials admonished Hong Kong people long time ago against expecting them to go to work with their conscience. Facts proved they were right. A reasonable society has never hinged on conscience of individual officials, but a reasonable system. Since the colonial era, Hong Kong people have been aware they need to stive for a reasonable system. Irrespective of how sinful the colonial politics used to be, it had to follow the advancement of human society to evolve. And the younger generation back then in the colonial schooling still had to take up the positions of the fallen and rise to fight one after another for Chinese being an official language, as well as various civil rights. Because of that, since the 70s of the last century, Hong Kong has been upgrading the protection of human rights and freedoms under the colonial rule.

Nowadays, the protection and systems set up before 1997 have been eroded by the authoritarian regime gradually. The more they think it can strengthen control over Hong Kong, the more Hong Kong is uncontrollable and the more serious social contradictions tend to be. Beijing and the SAR government has turned a sub-democracy into a thorough autocracy and ascribed all resistance to the so-called “interference from external forces” , which is fictitious. Over the past 23 years, the one who has interfered with Hong Kong affairs most barbarously is indeed self-evident. And has the SAR government ever stopped messing in schooling in Hong Kong?

Attributing all problems to the colonial education and the so-called “colonial complex” is simply a notion coming from nowhere. Today, the youngsters born and grown up in the SAR are the ones most rebellious against the current regime. They have never fared in the colony, so where did their colonial complex come from? If they have any imagination about the polity in the past, it only suggests how awkward the reality they are facing is. That the generation growing up under its rule has been at odds with it has shown beyond doubt how blundering this regime is!

The SAR government has gone so far as to put the problems it had created down to Liberal Studies, a subject that has been put in place since the Handover. This is outrageously preposterous. The reason why Tung Chee-hwa took the initiative to jam this subject in was to cleanse the education system of colonial schooling. In those days, it was said the education system had to be emancipated from where it was to provide students with a more extensive space to get to know their country, retrace how Hong Kong had come a long way and look into the future. Arthur Li Kwok-cheung, the then Secretary for Education, and Fanny Law Fan Chiu-fun, the then Permanent Secretary, both of whom led the development of Liberal Studies, also treated advice from different walks of life with contempt. Carrie Lam said the subject has had problems since day one. If this is really the case, shouldn’t she call Tung Chee-hwa, Fanny Law and Arthur Li to account?

While schools and Liberal Studies teachers in Hong Kong have been complying all along with the syllabus and scope of examination devised by the Education Bureau to achieve the objective of Liberal Studies, Carrie Lam laid the blame for all the problems on “critical thinking”, pointing out that it has made students “opposed to the government at every turn”. She has simply been blabbering on about nonsense, covering up botches she has made! Equating “critical thinking” with “being opposed to the government at every turn” has suggested Carrie Lam has already even got her mind messed up!

If she aims at turning the younger generation into the little reddish by modifying the syllabus of Liberal Studies to singing the praises and brainwashing, she just makes the issue simplistic and will not succeed in achieving anything! In today’s information society, will badmouthing critical thinking make the new generation believe only government propaganda? Can turning Liberal Studies into singing the praises teach the new generation to sell out their conscience like what the officials did?

Getting a Liberal Studies wiped out cannot reinforce the control over Hong Kong. The SAR government, instead of solving the problems, keeps wrecking the civilized systems that have got in shape after a long-term development of Hong Kong, laying mines for social turmoil in the days ahead. If the theory of mines laying is really valid, who was the first person to bury them?

(Chung Kim-wah, vice CEO of the Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institution)

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