Academics

In several of his blog posts recently (1, 2, 3), StephenC lamented the declining proficiency of academic skills in Hong Kong students, especially in the languages. Actually, if one takes a sampling of local students and tests their language skills, I suspect (no hard stats to back it up) that you will find that the situation is very, very polarized. The good students have excellent English skills -- much better than I would have had at the same age myself. The bad ones... sometimes I wonder if they know what they're trying to express themselves!

Many people might attribute this to the growing prosperity gap in Hong Kong. And certainly this is very true: the rich get richer, and the poor have been getting poorer. Take into account the numerous tutorial schools, after-school activities, etc etc that are available to the children of those who can pay, and you can see why the rich get a leg-up on their academics.

However, there is another factor. Today, we hosted a Hong Kong-wide robot contest for primary and secondary school students. I went walking around the pit area where all the teams were doing their preparation, and I was astonished to see students from some of the teams with their homework and revision materials spread out on the table, trying to get in some test prep in between contest rounds. It was not a surprise to find out that those students were from the elite schools.

What were the other teams doing? Most of them were just hanging out, some were playing computer games, some were even playing card games. The more serious were actually trying to make some final modifications to their robots or programs. I did not see anybody reading any books, either Chinese or English.

Is it a surprise, then, that students from the elite schools keep on sweeping all the best places, all the prizes? Then the question is: who's to blame?