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Abstract

From the Americas to Asia, neoliberal policy restructuring continues to present major challenges to educational equity. In Hong Kong, teacher educators grapple with training students in pedagogy they believe in, versus the daily status quo of high-stakes exam prep, privatized “shadow education,” and a system seemingly pushed to the brink of neoliberal social efficiency. Indeed, in recent years, Hong Kong has recorded top rankings on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the Programme for International Student Assessment, along with record-setting protests and student suicides. Like in the USA, neoliberalization of teacher education in Hong Kong has proffered dilemmas of standardized curricula, evaluation, and licensure, often under the guise of “21st century skills and technology.” Both regions also face perpetual threats of being under- or de-funded, based on “data-driven” decision-making and leadership that are supposedly more accountable and efficient. Unsurprisingly, neoliberal policies and practices have often exacerbated inequities in teaching and learning, especially for communities labelled as minority or working-class. Within traditions of critical pedagogy, this article’s authors engage in a discussion on how educators and students are navigating the neoliberal behemoth and developing more inclusive spaces across local contexts of language, class, and culture. Based on the authors’ research in the Americas and Greater China, this article interrogates some of the junctures and ruptures of neoliberal education in Hong Kong, long-held as bridge between “East” and “West.” The article draws from the first author Benji Chang’s action research projects with pre-and in-service teachers in the region, which examines how they are critiquing and challenging dominant discourses of neoliberalism (e.g., positivism, standardization, and market-economy), and what brings hope. Given Hong Kong’s history of colonization with Europe and the USA, and the ever-expanding dominance of mainland China, this article makes a contribution to international scholarship concerned with teacher education and social justice.

Keywords

Education policy Chinese education critical pedagogy teacher preparation educational equity curriculum

“Chinese” education and neoliberalism on the world stage

As the People’s Republic of China (PRC) continues to gain a dominant position on the world stage, “Chinese” educational systems have also garnered significant attention. While mainland China’s successes have been noted for the last 10 years or so, the academic achievements of Chinese populations around the globe have been observed for some three decades in countries such as the USA, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (Kell and Kell, 2010; Lee, 1994). Of the three territories included under the umbrella of “Greater China” (the others being Macao and Taiwan), the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the PRC is perhaps the most well-recognized. Returned as a territory to China by the United Kingdom in 1997, the HKSAR is now an international metropolis of seven million. Branding itself as “Asia’s World City,” Hong Kong has been applauded for its rapid socioeconomic development over the past several decades, which includes its position as one of the world’s leading finance centres. In education, Hong Kong has been held up as an example to emulate, given its consistent “Top 5” rankings on international exams such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, and the Programme for International Student Assessment (Darling-Hammond and McCloskey, 2008). Despite these markers of progress and achievement, there are still significant problems within Hong Kong’s society and educational system (Chang, 2018; Wu, 2005). Critiques of Hong Kong’s situation can be similarly made towards other schooling systems in “highly-developed” nations, which have often been built from foundations of colonization, imperialism, and more recently neoliberalism (Peters, 2012; Rizvi and Lingard, 2006).

For the purposes of this article, Harvey’s conceptualization of neoliberalism is instructive in stating:

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. (Harvey, 2005: 2)

We agree with Harvey (2005) that the neoliberal state is “a transitional” or “unstable” political form but caution that there is a tendency of essentializing neoliberalism as either hegemony of the market or an expression of Foucault's notion of governmentality. Wacquant (2012) offers a productive analysis that integrates both these conceptions of neoliberalism as the means by which the state is deployed to create conditions of possibility for subjectivities, collectivities, and social relations as they are geared to the capitalist marketplace. This involves conceptualizing the state as a bureaucratic field that exercises forms of statecraft viewed as an instrument of classification, stratification, commodification and distribution. In popular discourse, these forms have often been branded as “deregulation,” “free markets,” and “choice,” and they have become a major dimension of contemporary capitalist social life.

As the social state gets replaced by the consumer state, and public services are put on track to be privatized, neoliberalism is able to be insinuated in the education system. Hursh (2015) has discussed how education policy is under increasing control of unelected and unaccountable corporate reformers linked to wealthy philanthropists, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations who are pushing a privatized education model based upon neoliberal market competition. In schools, students are evaluated according to a market metric and governing tactics that punish “bad” schools instead of help them. This can be tied to an ever-increasing emphasis on high-stakes testing and value-added assessment which has pushed students, teachers, parents, and administrators to be subsumed by neoliberal logic which tends to submit all in its path to a process of monetization, and transformation into a commodity (McLaren, 2015a). Here, student interactions are modelled after an economic Darwinism that reduces human capacities to commercial algorithms, often exacerbating stratifications between and within race, ethnicity, gender, class and other groupings (Baldridge, 2016). Globally, neoliberal pedagogy is entangled in the logic of market individualism and efficiency, adding value to particular forms of labour power capacity (mostly as technicians rather than dialectical thinkers). Locally, there are also issues of neoliberalization within Hong Kong that are tied to its unique history and positionality in relation to mainland China and Asia, and because it acts as a bridge between “East” and “West.” As the proverbial spotlight moves in the direction of Asia and China, Hong Kong can be a generative place of study for more robust understandings and implications of neoliberalism, the mainland Chinese economic and educational behemoth, and Greater China in general.

This article interrogates some of the key issues of neoliberalism and social justice in Hong Kong’s education system. It particularly looks at issues raised in critical qualitative studies with Hong Kong students and educators. In examining these issues, this article utilizes analyses drawn from the diverse literature on critical pedagogy (Bartólome, 1994; Luke and Chang, 2007). In the critical pedagogy tradition of writing more accessible “talking” articles between two authors/educators (hooks, 2010; Horton and Freire, 1990), this article is a collaboration between Benji Chang and the second author Peter McLaren and takes shape through an interview format. This discussion stems from our work together in 2016 in Hong Kong. In our exchanges about the region, we talked about the application of critical pedagogies, which are often generated in the Global North, and areas of potential challenge and transformative change when applying critical pedagogies to educational systems in Greater China. For this article we begin by providing some context on Hong Kong’s schooling system. We then identify some of the major issues of educational equity, particularly those impacting students and teachers, and how communities in Hong Kong are working to resist and challenge those inequities. This article is not meant to be laser-focused on a few specific policies, but instead aims to explore several general areas of concern to stimulate future discussion and research. It is our hope that this collaborative piece can help contribute to the international dialogue on social justice-oriented approaches to teacher education and educational contexts connected to China, the Pacific Rim, and communities of Chinese heritage.

Varying contexts and policies

Economic prosperity

In 1997 Hong Kong changed its status as a territory of the United Kingdom, to an SAR of China. As an SAR like Macao, Hong Kong maintains a separate political, economic, and educational system from the PRC or mainland China (Wu and Vong, 2016). Due to various factors including the Cold War and the de facto closing-off of mainland China until the 1980s, Hong Kong has been one of the primary gateways to China, Asia, and the Pacific Rim for some four decades. Hong Kong is considered an international metropolis and one of the world’s leading financial centres following New York and London. It is usually amongst the top 15 globally for gross domestic product (purchasing power parity, per capita) which is higher than the USA, and is ranked 7th in Global Competitiveness by the World Economic Forum as indicated by the Hong Kong Legislative Council (Hong Kong Legislative Council Secretariat, 2016). Within the economic titan that mainland China has become, Hong Kong is ranked 2nd for economic competitiveness amongst Chinese cities. Despite these indicators of significant wealth in the region, the SAR also has numerous indicators of socioeconomic inequity. These include a high Gini coefficient of 0.537, a poverty level of 14.3% similar to the USA, and a minimum wage of US$4.19 per hour (Hong Kong Economic Analysis Division, 2016). In 2013, 20% of the population lived in poverty and it had one of the highest income gaps between rich and poor of any developed economy (Hu and Yun, 2013). These indicators suggest that despite the possibilities of neoliberalism, information technology, and globalization that were echoed around the globe, socioeconomic disparities persist for large segments of societies (Macrine et al., 2010; Martin, 2017), including Hong Kong.

Curriculum and assessment

Aside from its economic development, Hong Kong’s educational system has also significantly grown and changed over the past 40 years and it has been substantially examined (Adamson and Morris, 2010; Kan, 2007; Mok and Chan, 2001; Pennycook, 2002; Sweeting, 2004). For this article it is important to note a few key shifts in the SAR’s policies since public schooling was established in the early–mid 20th century. One key development was the large influx of migrants coming from mainland China around 1949 due to civil war. Hong Kong’s population nearly doubled at that time, and an exam was subsequently established for entrance to secondary schools. This exam on languages (Chinese and English), General Studies, and Maths had the effect of keeping the majority of primary students from continuing their education in government-funded schools. In 1978, nine-year compulsory schooling was implemented. At this time the exam changed to rank or “band” the ability of students to determine which type of secondary school they could attend. As of 1981, students had to sit for different exams to go on to secondary years four to seven, depending on the type of schools they previously attended. There are estimates that less than a third of students went on to secondary years six and seven, and perhaps 25% continued to post-secondary education. In the 1990s, the School-Based Curriculum (SBC) policy was in place to allow for a more customized curriculum at the campus level.

In 2000, what is now called the Hong Kong Education Bureau (EDB) initiated a series of significant reforms. In an effort to address worldwide socioeconomic changes including neoliberal policies, there were calls for the development of “21st century skills” that could help students address the needs of the information society and global economy. These calls for reform were also influenced by constructivist and cognitivist learning theory, which emphasized a process-oriented and learner-centred curriculum, including formative assessments (Carless, 2010). These reforms have often been grouped together under the banner of “Learning to Learn” (LTL), which stressed increased critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration (Wu, 2005). In 2004, the Territory-wide System Assessment (TSA) was implemented at the late primary and early secondary years and was intended to be a dynamic data-driven tool for evaluating student competencies as well as school quality and accountability (Darling-Hammond and McCloskey, 2008). In 2012, the Diploma of Secondary Education (DSE) became the sole exam used to evaluate students’ applications for tertiary education at the end of secondary schooling. The DSE essentially replaced the A-Level exams modelled after those of the UK. Within the DSE’s final score calculation, some School-Based Assessments (SBA) are included with the aim of generating a more dynamic assessment of a student’s competencies. Despite over two decades of SBC, SBA, and LTL reforms, Hong Kong’s curriculum still appears to be largely didactic and teacher-centred, with assessments being largely summative and used for screening and selection (Chan and Yuen, 2014; Deng, 2009). Much of the blame around this teacher-centred pedagogy has been attributed to the high-stakes exam culture perpetuated by the DSE, and increasingly the TSA. Studies have also found that Hong Kong has had relatively little effectiveness in developing critical thinking and civic engagement through schooling (Leung, 2008; Mok, 2009), which has been evident since British rule and its aims of keeping contentious politics and dissent to a minimum (Kan and Vickers, 2002).

School types

In the schooling system, there are approximately 338,000 primary students, 353,000 secondary students, and 81,000 in tertiary education, with some 53,000 teachers for primary and secondary (Hong Kong Education Bureau, 2017). A major factor for the larger number of secondary students is that Hong Kong’s population is aging with some of the world’s lowest mortality and birth rates (Hong Kong Statistics Section, 2015). There are nine years of compulsory public education (six primary + three junior secondary), with another optional three for senior secondary that most finish. Hong Kong’s school options can generally be categorized as one of four types. First, there are government schools which are like “public schools” abroad, where the campuses are fully-funded and government-run. These schools follow the government curriculum and assessments. Second, there are aided schools which are usually run by charitable organizations (often religious ones), but they also receive full funding for following the government curriculum and assessments as there is no strict “separation of church and state.” Third, there are Direct Subsidy Scheme (DSS) schools which receive a significant level of public funding which generally depends on how much of the government’s preferred curriculum and assessments they utilize, and how they admit their students. DSS schools were brought about in the 1990s to provide more schooling options and also draw in some of the private schools, many of which were seen as higher quality, to serve a growing and broader spectrum of Hong Kong families (Yung, 2006). DSS schools often charge fees to attend their school and have an application process. Private schools comprise the fourth type, which are run by varying organizations, have an application process, and charge tuition fees which are often the most expensive. They may receive some funds from the government for following certain guidelines but they are mostly self-funded as they administer their own curriculum.

In examining the policies around school choice, vouchers, and charter schools in the USA, there are similarities in the neoliberal rhetoric and rationale between the United States of America and Hong Kong. An example is the EDB handing over government funding to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), religious organizations, and other private groups to run public schools (e.g., aided and DSS) with the idea being that this outsourcing is more efficient in meeting market demands and providing choices for families, which ultimately produces more “competitive” students (Woo, 2013). Like US charter schools, many Hong Kong DSS schools promise greater individualization for youth, 21st-century pedagogy, and an air of being more elite than many government and aided schools. They are also examples of deregulation as DSS schools often operate under looser oversight than government or aided schools since some of their operations are funded outside of the government (Hong Kong Direct Susidy Scheme, 2011). DSS campuses also usually have some sort of application process and fees which can serve to screen out students that are seen as undesirable to the school’s mission of 21st-century learning and competitiveness. Finally, like charter schools in the USA (Kretchmar et al., 2014), there is a wide range of academic achievement and other outcomes at DSS schools, and there is not a clear body of research that shows their effectiveness as compared to the regulated government and aided schools.

Whether government, aided, or DSS, these three school types usually teach classes through some proportion of Cantonese, Mandarin (Putonghua), and English, with English and Mandarin being the languages of higher status, although Cantonese is most commonly used as the medium of instruction. Private schools, especially the international schools, usually teach the language and curricula of their sponsoring country (e.g., France and South Korea), as well as instruction in English (Yamato, 2003). Their assessments are often geared towards the International Baccalaureate programme, but some also prepare for the GCSE/A-Levels, Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), or the International English Language Testing System exams to prepare students to go to universities abroad as they are generally considered more prestigious. Per their namesake, international and other private schools are often at the forefront of promoting privatization, internationalization, and school choice, and are highly informed by neoliberal logic (Kim, 2015). Within this marketplace of school choice and language instruction, there is a dearth of opportunity for students who come from backgrounds that do not include Chinese dialects (e.g., Punjabi and Nepali), or do not have the resources to attend a school which teaches and assesses in languages that meet their needs. This is a significant barrier as Hong Kong schooling structures tend to look past languages that are not Chinese or English. These structures largely focus on developing the Cantonese-speaking majority’s skills in English and Mandarin, while making some accommodations for those that speak only Mandarin and are trying to adjust to the Cantonese-dominant society where English is also used for some business and government capacities (Lin, 2013; Pérez-Milans, 2017). There are a few publicly-funded schools that feature English as their mode of instruction and have some staff with language capacity for non-Chinese speaking communities. However, even if students are able to matriculate, and they go on to university, their Chinese language skills are not developed enough to compete for a variety of careers in Hong Kong, especially those with greater mobility and leadership opportunities (Gao, 2017).

Categories and identities

Based on the most recently released Census data in 2011, about 92% of those living in Hong Kong are of Chinese nationality, with Hong Kong citizens being counted as PRC nationals starting with the 2001 Census (Hong Kong Census Department, 2016a). About 6.6 million Chinese nationals have the SAR as their permanent residence, with 97,000 having their domicile elsewhere. Of the remaining non-Chinese residing in Hong Kong, the largest national groups are from Indonesia (137,000), the Philippines (135,000), UK (33,000), India (26,000), and Pakistan (17,000). Of those from Indonesia and the Philippines, over 93% are female, which is related to the domestic worker industrial complex (San Juan Jr, 2009). The other nations’ populations are more evenly distributed, but in 2015 there were about 550,000 more females than males in Hong Kong. Despite this statistical majority, it has been shown for some time that women in education, labour, and other sectors are treated as a ‘minoritized’ group (Chan, 2004; Cheung, 1997; Kam, 2012).

It is important to note that the statistics above do not completely reflect the ethnicity of those in Hong Kong. For example, some of the immigrants from the USA or the Philippines may be of ethnic Chinese background, and those from mainland China may be from ethnic groups other than the dominant Han Chinese. This lack of disaggregation may help reinforce the overgeneralization that all the “Chinese” living in Hong Kong are of the majority Han Chinese group (The Economist, 2016), and that they share the same linguistic and cultural practices which are sometimes essentialized as “Hong Kongnese” or “Hong Konger.” What is clearer are the numbers for how residents self-identified their ethnicity (Hong Kong Census Department, 2016b). The numbers largely mirror the nationalities named above (e.g. Philippines, India, Pakistan, and Nepal), with about 55,000 self-identifying as “White,” 30,000 as “Other Asian,” and 12,000 as “Others.” With hundreds of thousands of non-Chinese immigrants and residents in Hong Kong, two official languages of English and Chinese, and branding as “Asia’s World City,” the impression could be made that Hong Kong’s schooling system is diverse and multicultural. Indeed, the popular neoliberal discourse amongst many HKSAR campuses is to be multicultural/international in the globalization age (Larsen, 2016). But the reality for many linguistic minorities in Hong Kong appears to be a lack of access, services, and other forms of support that factor into low levels of achievement and agency. These minorities include working-class communities from South and Southeast Asia, and refugees from other regions. Unfortunately, there are little data about these groups when it comes to Hong Kong schools (Bhowmik et al., 2017). In addition, other minoritized groups who are often underserved can include Chinese “cross-border” students and families who commute from mainland China to attend Hong Kong Schools, or “newly-arrived” students, also from the PRC, who have challenges adjusting to the academic and sociolinguistic structures of the SAR (Yuen, 2012).

In this section we have outlined some of the major trends in the Greater China region of Hong Kong, including those in the economy, curriculum and assessment, school choice, language education, and demographic diversity. Despite significant development along certain indicators of finance, technology, and neoliberalization, diverse communities of the SAR experience a range of inequities, including those related to the schooling system. This is highly unfortunate considering Hong Kong’s unique and potentially transformative positioning along current and historical borders that demarcate “East” and “West,” as well as mainland China and the rest of the world. In the following conversation between A2 and A1, we begin to discuss how educational research has approached these issues, particularly through critical lenses.

Entering the conversation on Hong Kong education

In this section, we begin our interview on issues of education and social justice in Hong Kong. Although this discussion stems directly from seminars that took place in 2016, it began years prior in 2003 when Benji was a school teacher and both were based in Los Angeles. Over the years our conversations have explored the application of critical pedagogy and critical social theory towards issues of teachers, popular culture, formal and informal spaces of education, and social movements (Chang, 2014; McLaren, 2015b).

PM: Neoliberalism’s direct and indirect effects on education have been a key topic of study internationally, is this the case in the Hong Kong SAR as well?

BC: In the research I’ve done with students and teachers, neoliberalism emerges the majority of the time since its effects are often hot topics. These topics usually include how curriculum, assessment, teacher education, and school culture have changed in recent years, from early childhood to tertiary levels. In surveying the literature on Hong Kong education, there have been some studies that look at the variety of problems presented by neoliberalization (Chan Claudia and Bray, 2014; Choi, 2005; Poon-McBrayer, 2004).

PM: Tell me more about your particular research in Hong Kong. What are the types of projects you’ve been involved with as they relate to teacher education and neoliberalism?

BC: The projects stem from a platform of research that uses a critical and grounded approach and emphasizes the voices of local educators and students. I didn’t want to be the ‘international scholar,’ especially from ‘America,’ coming in and telling locals how to solve their problems with the “silver bullet” of critical pedagogy. So, I began with a small qualitative study concerning popular culture and education reform in Hong Kong, which involved 30 locally-based university students, teachers, and artists. From that study I next focused on a diverse group of 10 students preparing to be teachers in Hong Kong. In these projects with the students, teachers, and artists, the research group that I help coordinate has used interviews, surveys, and focus groups as our primary instruments of data collection. Aside from those projects I’ve conducted site visits and interviews with front-line educators and administrators at diverse educational institutions such as schools, tutorial centres, and NGOs, and I’ve listened to them share about their challenges and successes. What also informs the research is my work with_university students. Historically a conglomeration of normal colleges, places great emphasis on teaching and trains most of Hong Kong’s primary teachers. Although I have many students each year, I make it a point to dialogue with them about critical teaching and schooling issues. I also informally collect surveys with them that serve as formative assessments which help me improve the curriculum and tell me about key issues they face as most will become educators. Finally, as a teacher educator, I’ve had the opportunity to travel around Hong Kong and supervise new teachers in various types of schools (e.g., DSS and government) and subjects (e.g., maths and music). While neoliberalism may not be the starting point of my dialogue with students and educators, its effects often become focal points. My work is frequently situated around these points and looks at how teachers, students and community groups can disrupt inequities of neoliberalization and develop spaces of agency in and out of schools.

PM: How did your previous scholarship prepare you for your work in Hong Kong?

BC: My previous work in North America looked at issues of pedagogy, culture, literacy, and social justice with formal and informal learning spaces, particularly with communities from marginalized backgrounds. The approaches I primarily used were from critical pedagogy, cultural studies, new literacy studies, and sociocultural learning (Morrell, 2002; Muhammad, 2012; Okihiro, 2001), including those that incorporated a feminist standpoint, intersectionality, and critical race theory. Many of our conceptualizations in these frameworks are informed by the Americas’ legacies with colonialism and imperialism, the genocide and enslavement of indigenous and African peoples, a Black/White racial paradigm, and hard-fought social justice movements by people of colour and women (Goodwin, 2010; Martínez, 2017). There are numerous similarities to these paradigms in Greater China. Taiwan has a history of conflict between ruling Chinese groups and indigenous peoples, and Hong Kong and Macao have legacies of white imperialism with Portugal and England. However, Hong Kong and Greater China are still quite different from North America. One such area is the racial hierarchy concerning the hegemony of Han Chinese peoples, which can shift the optics of what we might consider to be critical or sociocultural scholarship.

A certain amount of the attributes of ‘whiteness’ in the North American and Australian scholarship (Gutiérrez, 2006; Luke and Luke, 1999) can be likened to the hegemony of Han Chinese (Chen, 2010), and the inequities spawned by neoliberal corporations abound in Greater China. However, new and remixed lenses are still needed when considering issues of pedagogy, language, culture, and literacy in the region. One example concerns the many communities that have been labelled under the monolithic category of “Chinese,” including the overseas, ethnic, or diasporic Chinese, and their movements in and out of geographic and educational spaces. Much of the research we have on Chinese groups tends to fall under essentializing “Model Minority” and “Chinese Learner” tropes and frames (Chang, 2017). But what we’re seeing in Hong Kong and other areas disrupts this scholarship as these communities have drastically changed in the past 15–20 years (Lin GCS, 2002; Ong, 2004), with significant implications for education. These implications can be more macro-level such as the movement of major funding from mainland China to educational institutions around the globe and the emerging dominance of Putonghua (Mandarin), to more micro-level issues like how we teach students citizenship amidst shifting notions of identity and nation-state (Alviar-Martin and Baildon, 2016). In Hong Kong, we tend to see research that is compartmentalized as either “local Hong Konger” Chinese or “mainland” Chinese. Outside of this dichotomy, there has been an uptick in the amount of funded and published studies regarding ethnic minorities. This scholarship has slowly nudged research to more critically approach issues of race, ethnicity, culture and power (Gu and Patkin, 2013), yet there are more communities that don’t fit the HKer/Mainland/Ethnic Minority typology. The diversity that we could learn so much from, even within those considered as Chinese, is flattened within dominant paradigms such as Confucianism and “the Chinese Learner” (Chan CKK and Rao, 2009; Kennedy, 2002). This is unfortunate as China has become a world power that we still have relatively insufficient scholarship about and access to, while policy and popular discourse continue to turn towards “Chinese” education in order to score well on neoliberal testing schemes (BBC, 2015; Zhao, 2014). With all of this attention on “Chinese” education, and as migrations and transnationalism to and from Greater China increase and diversify, this is a current and future research area that could be highly generative if we want to better address inequities and democracy. Similar to how Hong Kong was a bridge between “East” and “West” in the 20th century, it can serve as a bridge to critical understanding and analysis of what we might expect in the future of the “Asian Century.” This can include:

(a) What can culturally-relevant or culturally-sustaining teacher education mean in a “hyper/super” diverse society of Chinese and Asian ethnic communities, where the dominant majority is not indexed by white Europeans and English language?

(b) How is citizenship and civic education taught when school populations are frequent border-crossers, heavily transnational, and often not raised by their parents?

(c) How might transformative forms of resistance and community engagement emerge under a heavily-censored one-party system where activists, journalists and NGO workers are routinely imprisoned or disappear, even in nations outside of China?

Currently, I’m exploring some of this work with colleagues in Hong Kong. I’ve also been utilizing some of the work that has emerged in postcolonial theory and cultural studies (Ang, 2001; Chen, 2010), to more dynamically tackle issues in education, action research, and social movements.

Confronting issues of neoliberalism and schooling

PM: These are vitally important issues that you’re raising, and I agree that we need more research in these areas, especially at this historical juncture, when the world is fraught with geopolitical tensions. A more dialectical approach is needed to capture the shifting ethnic, linguistic and political configurations you mention and how they have and are playing out historically. And, of course, we need new taxonomies and methodologies to give us a more granular understanding of how such configurations are being labelled and understood among researchers. We’ve talked a bit about some of Hong Kong’s broader areas of social justice in education, as well as dominant research paradigms and your own scholarship in the region. In terms of the students and teachers you’ve worked with, what are some of the major issues that have emerged in Hong Kong teacher education today?

BC: Within our research, three issues of teacher education were often brought up. One was the dominance of teacher-centred, direct-instruction models, where student knowledge and experience is not accessed or valued much through banking models of education. These pedagogies can often be found in various subjects of secondary, primary, and higher education (Jaffee, 2012; Lam, 2008). The second issue raised was the hegemony of high-stakes testing and exam culture, particularly the DSE, which is the primary measure used to judge a Hong Kong student’s eligibility for university. Far more significant than the SAT in the USA, the DSE is held as a fundamental reason why Hong Kong must perpetuate teacher-centred, direct-instruction pedagogies, due to its supposed efficiency and objectivity (Berry, 2008; Soh, 2013). The third issue raised about the HKSAR was the paucity of leadership, creativity, and critical thinking development in classrooms and schools (Clark and Gieve, 2006; Luk, 2012). Here we find Hong Kong’s schooling system often framed along a dichotomy. On one hand, the system is seen as efficient, transparent, and high-achieving on exams: all tenets of neoliberalism’s flattening and streamlining of schooling through data, testing, and auditing. On the other hand, the SAR’s embrace of neoliberal and social efficiency curriculum models is seen as a runaway train that exacerbates problems that were already identified in prior decades (Tong, 2010), such as rote pedagogy and an over-emphasis on testing.

PM: Neoliberalism is a bane that has a global reach and no capitalist commodity culture that I know has been able to escape its dangerous impact on education, exacerbating old problems and creating new forms of governmentality that create new dilemmas. In the USA, I’ve been trying to develop approaches to critical pedagogy that can combat the worst impact of neoliberal education policies and practices but the culture of efficiency – audit culture – is very ingrained in the system at multiple levels. It sounds like you’re experiencing similar challenges. Can you expand on the three issues you named concerning teacher-centred pedagogy, high-stakes exam culture, and the lack of creativity, critical thinking, and leadership development? Perhaps begin with youth experiences?

BC: As it’s been argued in critical research, the three issues often go hand-in-hand in perpetuating the others (Au, 2009; Lipman, 2011). Let us start with the DSE, which appears to be a linchpin in the overall scheme. Officially, the DSE was supposed to be a liberalization of the old standardized exam, including some modifications like a broader array of subject material that students could choose to be tested on (Leung K-C et al., 2014). But in reality, the exam often serves as a gatekeeping mechanism which stratifies students and keeps many of them from entering Hong Kong’s eight publicly-funded universities. The TSA exam is also increasingly used as a way to stratify younger students, but currently it isn’t as dominant. Amongst the students and teachers, we talked with, the DSE was the most common barrier to practicing the types of pedagogies they felt were more engaging, creative, constructivist, and/or critical. Indeed, each semester when I ask 80 of my undergraduates about their schooling experiences with more transformative pedagogy, they usually say they had some experiences in primary or tertiary, but not in senior secondary (the final three years). Bennett, a local fourth-year English major, shared an experience similar to most of his classmates, “At my high school, luckily I had some teachers that cared. But most of my education focused on preparing for the DSE in the last few years…It focused on that way too much.” I recently visited the Hong Kong School of Creativity (HKSC), a DSS senior secondary school that is operated by an NGO. HKSC focuses on actualizing creativity through studies of art, design, and culture, and is a well-known but isolated example of using critical pedagogies towards transformative outcomes for all members of the school community. To the lament of HKSC administration and teachers, many students and their parents opt to go with the more traditional test-prep curriculum towards the DSE in their final two years. This is significant to note as even in one of the schools most well-known for developing creativity and critique, and one in which students choose to attend, there is still considerable conformity to the high-stakes exam.

Aside from the DSE’s influence on secondary schooling and its narrowing effect on campuses and curricula, there are other areas where its presence is felt. Shadow education refers to out-of-school educational spaces that students’ families use which are typically provided by private businesses. In the neoliberal era we see cuts in public school and social service funding, and the advancement of for-profit companies offering to fill the gaps in a highly-unregulated market (Kwok, 2004). Hong Kong, like South Korea, is perhaps a more extreme example of this privatization (Byun, 2014; Chan and Bray, 2014). In our talks with students and pre-service teachers, those from a variety of backgrounds critiqued the SAR’s educational institutions and the DSE for fostering a situation where exams are king. They specifically mentioned how shadow education was an ever-present fixture in the lives of most young people they knew, to the point where it’s unusual for youth not to go to tutorial programmes for hours after-school and on weekends, in order to gain some sort of edge with classes, exams, or the student’s curriculum vitae (CV). Understanding the “dog-eat-dog world” competitiveness that can spiral from such a situation for students, parents, and schools, we asked participants where the teachers were in all of this. They responded by portraying teachers as stuck in a bind where many barely have enough time to transmit and grade test prep materials due to large class sizes, frequent curriculum modifications, and perpetual pressure from parents and administration to prepare their students for exams. In this hectic situation, the seemingly ubiquitous shadow education is more or less expected to help students with actually understanding the content and answers they should use on exams.

A running joke about Hong Kong youth is that since primary school they are pushed from school to tutorial and back. Youth have no time to develop outside of test prep, exams, traditional academics, and activities that make them more competitive in applying to secondary schools (locally or abroad), and eventually universities. There are unfortunate truths to this joke. When we add the statistic that a couple hundred thousand Hong Kong families pay low-wage Southeast Asian domestic workers to chaperone their children instead of the parents (Yelland et al., 2013), it can all seem very much like a business arrangement. For many Hong Kong secondary and tertiary students, there isn’t much opportunity for development in areas like the arts, athletics, creativity, and critical thinking. Before 2000 there was already public and private support for “21st-century skills” and lifelong learning reforms (Wai, 2000), but what has developed seems more like a flat and narrow operationalization of education. Policy can strongly support pedagogies of care, critical inquiry, and community-building (Chang and Lee, 2012) (Pang, 2006). But when such pedagogies are impeded, alienation and desperation can emerge (Tokunaga, 2016; Wang et al., 2011), and in Hong Kong a tragic statistic comes to mind. Last year, some 22 students committed suicide over eight months (Cheung and Chiu, 2016). Students in our projects made direct connections between these desperate behaviours and a system that doesn’t authentically engage with youth’s lives beyond ideologies of markets and social efficiency. While perhaps Hong Kong doesn’t have the same rates of dropouts or gangs as other metropolises, the student suicides are a statistic that, in the very least, serves as a warning about the significant increase of disaffected youth in schools.

Honing in on teaching and teacher education

BC: As we hone in on teachers, let’s bring together our discussion so far. In the “Varying contexts and policies” section, we began by pointing out how neoliberalism has been widely lauded although the socioeconomic realities of many in Hong Kong are highly inequitable. We then discussed changes in educational policies over time, with neoliberalism being the logic of reforms along with connected notions of internationalization and 21st-century skills. Despite these reforms, we see curricula and testing that often perpetuate the status quo of exam culture and banking models of pedagogy. When discussing school types, we outlined similarities to global trends of school choice and privatization, and how reforms since the 1990s have echoed rationalities of preparing children towards neoliberal imperatives but haven’t necessarily made the anticipated gains. Finally, in addressing nationality, sex, language, and ethnicity, we highlighted issues of educational equity and access with the SAR’s various minoritized groups and suggested a more nuanced approach to understanding Chinese diversity. In the “Entering the conversation on Hong Kong education” section, we painted a broad portrait of some of the research paradigms on Hong Kong education. We mentioned areas where critical and sociocultural lenses may be generative within this research, but also areas such as “Chinese culture” where more nuanced conceptualizations are needed. In the “Confronting diverse issues of neoliberalism and schooling” section, we focused on three large areas of concern for the various stakeholders we have worked with. These three areas being teacher-centred pedagogy, high-stakes exam culture, and the lack of creativity, critical thinking, and leadership development in the schooling system.

PM : Regarding these three areas, can you connect what you discussed about students’ experiences with those of teachers? I’d like to know how they are dealing with the very competitive culture surrounding educational success in Hong Kong, especially as related to high-stakes testing. I know there is great emphasis placed on test preparation and “teaching to the test.” Is there a conflict between constructivist approaches to learning and the more traditional “Confucianism”? I’m wondering if teachers are treated by parents more like learning technicians whose sole purpose is to raise their children’s test scores.

BC: Regardless of age level or subject, educators have shared that they most enjoy teaching when they are able to creatively design and teach content, and apply constructivist approaches that they were trained in. Like the students we’ve talked to in our projects, the teachers tend to believe in promoting critical thinking, project-based learning, and formative assessments. In talking with a group of postgraduate teachers, many shared that they went into teaching because of the satisfaction they developed through the aforementioned approaches, and the subsequent connections and learning that occurred with youth. Hazel, a first-year Economics teacher, shared, “I enjoy being surrounded in an education environment – not only do students learn from teachers, dynamic student backgrounds allow teachers to learn from students…making a teacher’s job constantly learning and reflecting.”

Unfortunately, like the students we talked to, the teachers emphasized the barriers to constructivist pedagogies presented by the DSE and exam culture. Although it’s a popular approach within the literature, the teachers didn’t routinely blame Confucianism or other elements of “traditional Chinese culture” for the barriers to pedagogies they supported. Instead they saw a policy issue, emphasizing the DSE’s structure and how school administrations try to follow suit. The teachers also saw the problems related to Hong Kong parents getting caught up in rankings, titles, and the latest trends as proxies for learning, quality education, and university preparedness. An outcome of this is the pressure that teachers and school leaders receive from parents, typically middle-class or wealthy, who zero in on high-stakes testing and don’t want their children to waste time learning anything other than what is on the big exam. While there isn’t as much emphasis on primary teachers, they are also under pressure similar to administrators concerned about their rankings, and parents concerned about their child’s CV when it comes time to apply for secondary schools, given that schools of higher reputation usually require an application process.

Our participants often referred to parent–teacher communications as somewhat antagonistic, especially when parents spoke to educators more from a standpoint as their “employers,” with the teacher as “employee,” and the child as “product.” Our teacher participants highlighted the lack of relationships and the human-side of education, as the parents are too busy to work with their kids on homework, or even pick-up their kids from school or tutoring. Instead they invest in shadow education to instruct their kids during out-of-school hours, and they pay domestic workers to shuttle their kids around town, as the parents’ work schedules only allot them time to read “executive summaries” on their child (e.g., scores and marks). To be fair, some parents decry this cycle, and wish that the system wasn’t structured as such so they could raise their children differently (Rhodes, 2015; Waters, 2006). But at the other end, school management points at parents and say that the main reason they focus on test prep is because it’s what the parents want. Ultimately, parent and administrative pressure seems to privilege teacher-centred and didactic instruction, as they are seen to be efficient, objective, and “fair” in the sense that all the students are treated “the same.” Peter your work has been instructive here in understanding how this rhetoric of employer/employee/product and the fixation on testing and the latest trends is tied to the insidious effects of late capitalism and consumerism in schools and society (McLaren, 2015b).

Praxis and possibility: challenging dehumanization

PM : We’ve discussed a range of issues in Hong Kong and Greater China, some of which are similar to other countries’ experiences with neoliberalism, while other issues are unique to the SAR’s history and positionality. What are some promising areas in challenging educational injustices? What brings hope?

BC: In 2014, there were mass protests that focused on democratic elections and other issues including education. These protests came to be known as The Umbrella Movement, although they’re sometimes referred to as “Occupy Central” which takes its name from the international movements of 2011 and on. The Umbrella Movement was highly-publicized globally, and it’s had an immense impact across the society (Fung and Su, 2016; Lau, 2017). Although the Umbrella Movement didn’t materialize into democratic elections, it did inspire many to be more explicit in expressing their discontent with Hong Kong’s inequities, and it revealed that a wider spectrum of society was willing to support such direct-action forms of resistance. But Hong Kong is no stranger to mass protest, among them being the 2012 Moral and National Education protest, the 2003 anti-subversion law protests, the 1989 protests against the Beijing Tiananmen Square massacre, and the so-called 1967 Leftist Riots. Forms of mass protest have included marches, labour disputes, or rioting, with the more recent protests above including tens to hundreds of thousands. These numbers are significant, especially the 1.5 million who protested in 1989, given that Hong Kong’s population is only now about seven million.

But when the marches are over, and the cameras are off, the work for social justice continues. It’s important to look more closely at other change efforts, beyond what may be recognized as large-scale resistance and social movements. In international critical education literature, we’ve seen myriad ways in which different school stakeholders may become active in challenging inequities (Goldstein, 2000; Kiang, 1998; Villegas et al., 2008). In Hong Kong, there hasn’t been nearly as much coverage of this work. However, educational research utilizing critical approaches has been around for at least fifteen years. This scholarship has tended to be more on policy and curriculum critique, using frameworks such as poststructural feminism, culturally relevant pedagogy, postcolonial theory, critical pedagogy, and Bourdieusian theory (Chan, 2002; Jackson, 2016; Mui, 2010; Tsoi, 2015). Aside from critiquing policies and curricula that foster inequities for some communities, often these works bear the burden of legitimizing methodologies that don’t use positivist educational psychology or market-based educational structures as their benchmarks (Hui and Chan, 2006; Yuen, 2017). But there has also been scholarship on classrooms that employ a critical pedagogy and seek to develop agency with teachers and students from early childhood to tertiary levels (Chan and Lo, 2016; Lin, 2004; Soto Pineda, 2016). These studies have tended to be in the subjects of Liberal Studies (LS) and English. Aside from critical pedagogy research, there have been classroom studies that look at contexts of critical thinking and civic engagement (Kam, 2012; Morris and Vickers, 2015). Although they often don’t use critical theory, this research is significant to note because they pose questions about student engagement, school reform, social issues, and impact.

PM : How about the students and teachers you’ve worked with, what are some of practices they’ve been enacting to resist inequities?

BC: For the students in our projects, their worldviews were shifting to become more critical of larger societal structures. With the undergraduates we talked with, some were directly involved in attending Umbrella Movement meetings and actions. This connected to the classroom, with them showing interest in ideas about how students and youth can help bring about democracy, including through education. Even more students were openly supportive of the Umbrella Movement and interested in social justice efforts. While broader ideas of democracy and social change were discussed, students also became “politicized” for more individual issues. Some had friends who protested and then were arrested or persecuted through different means, and this had a sobering effect as they felt that the police and government needed serious change. Brendan, an Umbrella participant and graduating student in education, stated, “We follow the system and go through all of this to get to university. But when we graduate, we can’t even afford a home. So, what’s the point?” This echoes several students’ words about their generation’s shrinking opportunities compared to previous decades, and how the schooling structure and increasing influence of Beijing has made it worse. Ultimately, students talked about adjusting their own educational path to become more politically-conscious teachers and potential researchers. This included changing their pedagogy with their own students (e.g., tutoring and student teaching) towards constructivist and critical pedagogies.

For the teachers in our projects, their efforts commonly resembled the forms taken by educators in other international contexts. However, they were also sensitive in labelling their work as “Marxist,” “revolutionary,” or even “critical,” given Hong Kong’s first-hand history of many fleeing the Chinese Civil War and the Cultural Revolution just across the border. In addition, there was vigilance paid to the seemingly increasing amount of silencing of Hong Kong-based academics, and the international disappearances of local booksellers who satirized Beijing (Joseph and Hunt, 2016; Petersen and Currie, 2008). But whether they felt the inequities stemmed from the PRC power structure, or neoliberalization of Hong Kong schools, the teachers talked about taking a stand in some way and not just following the status quo. Several teachers discussed supporting students outside of the official curriculum. Although some felt they couldn’t do much about the exam structure (Chiu and Walker, 2007), they felt they could promote change through a more humanizing culture in and out of their classes, getting to know their students well, and providing socio-emotional support. For these teachers, just talking to youth and colleagues in these ways resisted and challenged some of their school’s market and audit culture (Ball and Olmedo, 2013). Aside from promoting a culture of care, other teachers sought to develop critical consciousness and forms of agency of their students. At an aided secondary school serving working-class students, a few LS teachers were developing a problem-posing pedagogy as part of a curriculum that develops critical inquiry with students via civic engagement projects. Similar to US Social Studies teachers, many of our teacher and student participants felt that LS was the subject where critical pedagogy could most directly be translated in Hong Kong. But beyond LS and secondary contexts, some student-teachers tried to tackle issues of social justice in their maths and English primary classrooms, which included reading multicultural picture books and addressing issues of fairness. Despite the challenges of addressing social justice in their time-constrained curricula, hope remained for teachers who felt they could still make an impact. Kristina, a 20-year veteran who was highly critical of her administration’s emphasis on audit culture, declared, “Even with all of these issues, it’s still about the student–teacher interactions. When I close the classroom door, I’m still the teacher.”

Aside from the actions of educators and students, in our research we’ve come across other spaces that are striving for greater educational equity in Hong Kong. We previously mentioned some parents who critique the market-based curricula of many of the SAR’s institutions. Some of these parents send their children to alternative secondary schools like the aforementioned HKSC founded in 2006, and the RTC Gaia primary school, founded in 2007, which focuses on student autonomy and sustainable green-living (Yeung, 2012). Some parents have also collectively developed early childhood centres that focus on play and other forms of more holistic learning (Genishi and Dyson, 2009), which families can use public subsidies to attend. Outside of schools, some NGOs critically address issues of education. One of the most prominent has been Hong Kong Unison, which focuses on ethnic minority communities. Although the organization started off supporting individual clients in 2001, it has expanded to broader advocacy work, as well as educational programmes and social services. While there are other groups doing similar work, Unison is noted for its critical approach to issues of racism, citing social structures and institutions that perpetuate inequities.

PM : These are indeed inspiring stories. My work has shifted discernibly since the mid-1990s towards a Marxist humanism, and now is infused with Catholic social justice teaching inspired by liberation theology. I’m well aware that critical pedagogies that draw from Marxism may not be widely utilized in Hong Kong, especially given the political context that you’ve described. Yet, there are movements within the field of education that, as I said, are inspiring. As we close, are there any final connections you want to make between these forms of resistance to neoliberal education and critical pedagogies of the future?

BC: Inspiring is definitely the word, and eye-opening. The efforts of different groups of educators, students, and activists here have really helped push our understandings of education and social justice. As we’ve discussed in this article, Hong Kong’s particular institutional arrangements, its demographics, its wealth and high rankings, and its three pervasive problems (teacher-centred pedagogy, high-stakes testing, and lack of holistic development through schooling), all lay out a rich and complex terrain in which to better understand and tackle neoliberal policies. As I continue my work in educational equity and sustainability, and tie it to social movements, I’m looking forward to learning more about how educational efforts have been tied to broader forms of organizing, including NGOs and organized labour. As I mentioned in the third section, I think Hong Kong and Greater China also present generative opportunities to push critical scholarship which has often leaned on similar histories of colonization, imperialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. But when we look at the ascendance of mainland China and Hong Kong (Yan and Chang, 2011), some of the dominant models of critical theory can get disrupted when Christianity, Western European languages, and white men aren’t necessarily on top. Patriarchy, homophobia, and neoliberalism persist as vehicles of material and symbolic violence, but the ways in which they operate and confront resistance take forms that we may not be so familiar with in the Global North.

While Hong Kong, mainland China, South Korea and Singapore have reported significant growth in using neoliberal evaluations of economy and education, critical assessments also indicate significant marginalization and exploitation of teachers and school communities (Lim and Apple, 2016). I’m thus encouraged by the collaborations and solidarity across Greater China, as well as in East and Southeast Asia, between critical scholarship and other forms of social justice work (Constable, 2009; Lau, 2017; Sung and Pederson, 2012). For our next steps in Hong Kong, the research team I coordinate is piloting a long-term educational pipeline project to develop diverse cohorts of undergraduates as critical educators and action researchers in the SAR (Chang, 2017). In addition, we’re collaborating with scholars from mainland China, Australia, and North America to look at how different communities of Chinese background are challenging educational inequities (e.g., high-stakes exams and teacher training). We aim to help promote grassroots voices of critique, dissent, and hope as we build alternative futures to the ravages of neoliberalization in the region.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Benjamin “Benji” Chang is an assistant professor at the Education University of Hong Kong. Dr. Chang's scholarship addresses the areas of educational policy, pedagogy, literacy, teacher education, and social movements. In particular, his work focuses on comparative and international contexts of Chinese and Asian diaspora, and marginalised populations such as working-class, minority, and immigrant communities. Two central themes throughout Dr. Chang's work are agency and sustainability, as they relate to education for social justice. Dr. Chang was a postdoctoral fellow at Teachers College, Columbia University, USA, and has been a visiting scholar at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia, and Beijing Normal University, People’s Republic of China.

Peter McLaren is a distinguished professor in Critical Studies, Co-Director and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice, The Paulo Freire Democratic Project, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University. He is also Honorary President of Instituto McLaren de Pedagogıa Crıtica, Mexico, and Honorary Chair Professor, Northeast Normal University, People's Republic of China. He is the author and editor of 50 books. His writings have been translated into 30 languages.

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Emerging issues of teaching and social justice in Greater China: Neoliberalism and critical pedagogy in Hong Kong

Abstract

Keywords

“Chinese” education and neoliberalism on the world stage

Varying contexts and policies

Economic prosperity

Curriculum and assessment

School types

Categories and identities

Entering the conversation on Hong Kong education

Confronting issues of neoliberalism and schooling

Honing in on teaching and teacher education

Praxis and possibility: challenging dehumanization

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

References