My First Impression of Hong Kong's Education System

The word ‘education,’ when searched on Google, lists this as the first definition:

“The process of receiving or giving systematic instruction, especially at a school or university.”

This definition fails to capture my own time — my formative, beautiful, illuminating time — as a university student myself. When I reflect upon what transpired during my time as a university student, I am drawn to the relationships, wisdom, habits, books, seminars, and mentors. I do not immediately recollect what I learned through “systematic instruction” — though I had my share of this, by no means did it define my education. While rote memorization and vacuous regurgitation was demanded of me at times, these presented an infinitesimal corner of the world that education opened up to me. Google’s definition conveys a far too mechanical, offhand dismissal of what really is a lovely and labyrinthine pathway ablaze with opportunities and erudition at each bend, culture and wisdom upon each straightaway.

The word ‘education’ is difficult to define because it more closely resembles an experience — not a concrete noun. An education takes place over an extended duration as a revelatory, personal endeavor and one that is, ideally, tailored for the very individual that is its fulcrum. A full, authentic immersion met with unalloyed enthusiasm within education should be nothing short of life-changing.

It took looking all the way down to Google’s fifth bulleted definition to get closer to this idea:

“An enlightening experience.”

That definition seems much more fitting to me; it paints education as something of gravity and something with allure instead of cosmetic.

This is the definition I carried with me as a first-year teacher in Hong Kong—it has not been all too popular so far.

Shortly upon my arrival, I learned that this is a place that pursues education severely and with little sympathy — few are in search of “enlightenment” within education, and most consciously seek out the “systematic instruction” Google posits.

I have witnessed education as the vehicle of choice to express a vicarious and misplaced hyper-competitiveness of the parents. Students are pushed by their parents into classes that they are not old enough for, and yet they are expected to excel immediately. Delays in a students’ progress are met with disbelief instead of concern. Veritable babies are given Herculean academic loads —  it is as if parents anxiously await the first syllable of their unsullied infant to designate their eligibility for homework.

I have students in my English classes as young as two. They arrive in tears and often remain in tears, awaiting the liberating hands of their parents to take them out of this foreigner's classroom (though, it is not uncommon for these “liberating” hands to take them immediately to another lesson or tutoring session or music course). In the tender moments I have with a particular two-year-old, there may be five or six or seven others just as young and bewildered and with similarly wet cheeks — and it is my job to teach them English.

Just the other week, one of my students — an adorable toddler girl of two — peed her pants while standing up in class. As I stared down at the puddle forming around her doll-sized sneakers, she simply looked up at me blankly, as unmoving and undisturbed as she was beforehand. She was innocently unaware that the satisfaction of bladder relief was not meant to transpire over wood floors — but so were you and so was I at two years old!

While my job title is “teacher,” there are many days where I instead fill the role of a glorified babysitter. The parents’ insistence on enrolling their infant into classes beyond their fledgling abilities facilitates this changing of hats; I do not mind this role, but it seems suspect to call this education.

I have other students of five or six years old, and they frequently tell me of how little time they have outside of academics. English lessons, Chinese lessons, maths and sciences, general studies, verbal dictations — every ounce of their prepubescent efforts are allotted to studying. What is almost more shocking is the manifest nonchalance with which my students tell me this; sparse hours of playtime are an expectation, as prosaic and ingrained as their infrequency of leisure and unabating forecast of assignments.

There have been many times where I think of how absurd — how foreign — some of these things seem to me. Giving a two-year-old homework revisions, training a baby how to answer interview questions, hearing about how expansive a three-year-old’s CV needs to be to get into a “top” kindergarten (I was shocked too the first time I heard of a three-year-old with a curriculum vitae). Every single child here is inundated with books and grammar and classes, expected to undertake a fuller schedule than university students.

My students tell me how tired they are, recounting their hours of homework from the previous night and the early hours they rise in the morning to fit in extra language revisions before school. Just the other day, one of my brightest students — five years old and trilingual — could barely hold her pencil to write because she kept nodding in and out of a stolen slumber. She told me she had been studying the previous evening for a Chinese written exam, and her mother had her write a single sentence 100 times over.

Maybe I’m just a pushover, bringing over my feeble, undisciplined Western perspective to Hong Kong, but a parent asking a weary, heavy-eyed five-year-old to rewrite a sentence 100 times seems more punitive than affectionate to me.

The Hong Kong parents I’ve encountered expect a specific image of a teacher; straying from this is met unkindly. My ability to speak Chinese was not greeted with the eagerness I anticipated coming in as a bilingual teacher, but rather this was viewed as a detriment. Being able to console a crying infant in their native language, directly translate words for additional clarity, and understanding a student’s needs in their own language were all clumped together into the direct antithesis of what a “Westerner” should be. Though my students immediately took to me, I did not fit the stereotype for the Chinese parents here. I was not the fair-skinned, fair-haired, monolingual Westerner that fit their archetype — all this in spite of my very Western upbringing, education, and childhood in California. 

Now, to continue working as an English teacher, I have to “forget” my Chinese each day and am expected to stare blankly back at parents and students when I hear Chinese, feigning incompetence in their — in my — own language. Is this really beneficial in a classroom setting for the kids? For the teacher?

Either way, it begs the question again: how does one properly define ‘education’? If not enlightenment, and if not an assembly line, where does the happy medium lie? The pressure on the children from the parents is what I observe empirically, though I do wonder where the parents themselves receive the pressure. Is it cultural? Is it from other parents? Do the kids seek out this intensity?

In a place ostensibly obsessed with written revisions and assignments for babies, has anyone even whispered the possibility of too much homework?

Has anyone shouted it?

It seems I depart this week with more questions than answers for you. I leave Hong Kong to Taiwan tomorrow; maybe a change of country will help me pose just a few more.