HONG KONG, January 25, 2013 – Yesterday, not once, but twice I felt like I was having déjà vu. But it wasn’t anything paranormal: I had visited three different schools, all three of which had nearly identical histories.
Hong Kong is awash in new international schools. More accurately, they are private, nonprofit schools that, though they teach International Baccalaureate curricula and do so in English, serve the local Hong Kong population, especially those of Chinese descent. These schools are just coming of age; some have graduated only a handful of senior classes, while others have yet to hold their first commencement.
It’s clearly an exciting time, both for the schools and for Hong Kong education.
By the time I heard this story for the third time, I figured that the founding of all of these schools a nearly the same time – all are K-12, so they opened with primary school in the early 2000s and have been adding grades since then – had to be more than just a coincidence.
I asked around, and the reason, of course, is the Handover.
The 1997 end of British rule in Hong Kong resulted in surprisingly few changes to the former colony. Hong Kong still has its own legal and monetary systems. It controls its own immigration policy, and its passport-holders consider themselves citizens of Hong Kong and not of the People’s Republic. It is the business and cultural capital of China, while feeling a world apart from the Mainland. And yet, with the departure of the British, so went the British educational system.
Hong Kong’s ethnic Chinese majority—long prominent in business but not in politics—has been asserting itself in many ways, especially through education. The schools I visited were founded in large part so that Mandarin would be part of the curriculum. These schools teach generous helpings of Mandarin and have adopted the IB curriculum because it is respected by colleges around the world—and Hong Kong students are applying in droves not only to local Hong Kong universities (where admission rates are plummeting) but also to schools in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and, of course, the UK.
It is hoped that the generation of students attending these new international schools will enjoy high-quality education while, at the same time, asserting their identity as both citizens of Hong Kong and of the world.
–Josh Stephens
