Forked tongues

It was an admission of cultural defeat; but then Hong Kong is nothing if not pragmatic about such things. On June 6 its education minister, Michael Suen Ming-yeung, lifted restrictions that forced four-fifths of [its] secondary schools to teach in Cantonese… Schools may switch to English, the language of the former colonial oppressor, from next year.

This reverses a decade-old policy adopted after Hong Kong’s reversion to China in 1997… Students speak Cantonese at home, and so using it is the easiest way to impart information. It is also the first language of most teachers: a study concluded that schools labelled “English-medium” were actually teaching in Cantonese but using English-language textbooks… After much bureaucratic shuffling, 20 per cent of schools were permitted to continue teaching in English. That may have made sense to teachers and administrators, but not to ambitious parents. They know that their offspring will need English to get ahead. Those who could flee the public system for costly private schools… did so. The rest made extraordinary efforts to enter the minority of English-language schools… That helps explain Mr Suen’s change of heart. So does a survey published last year, which concluded that students from the Cantonese schools did far worse than their peers in getting into universities… And whatever the educators think, employers from coffee bars to banks either require people to be bilingual or pay more to those who are. Private schools offering supplementary English tuition have mushroomed.

As China’s most global city, Hong Kong needs skills in both English and Mandarin, or putonghua, China’s common language. Pragmatists want Hong Kong to drop Cantonese entirely in favour of the two more broadly used languages. But that may demand a level of cultural indifference which even Hong Kong cannot muster.

Excerpted from an article in ‘The Economist’