Advertisement
Education
OpinionComment
Kerry Kennedy
Kerry Kennedy

Opinion | Did deregistered Hong Kong teacher receive the fair hearing he deserved?

  • The teacher apparently had no chance to respond in person to the complaint about his lesson plan
  • The Basic Law also does not specifically prohibit teaching about the pro-independence movement, raising questions over the grounds on which he was deregistered

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
0
Michelle Li Mei-sheung, Permanent Secretary for Education, and Kevin Yeung Yun-hung, Secretary for Education, meet the press at Tamar on October 6. Photo: Dickson Lee
Kerry Kennedy
It is clear that the Beijing authorities have Hong Kong schools and teachers in their sight, as the recent case of the deregistered teacher shows. So focused are the chief executive and the Education Bureau on weeding out “bad apples” that issues of process, fairness and professionalism seem to have been forgotten.
It does not help that details of the deregistration case only seeped out little by little. One day it seemed the teacher was deregistered because he was promoting Hong Kong’s independence in his classroom. The next day it was revealed that this teacher was not actually teaching but that he designed the lessons that were taught by other teachers.
At some stage, there was a review of the case by the Education Bureau. The review seems to have been paper-based and the teacher concerned was not interviewed. The final decision on deregistration was made by the permanent secretary for education, with the possibility of review by the chief executive or a formal judicial review. The key question in all of this is whether this is an appropriate way to manage the teaching profession.

The first step should have involved a professional assessment, involving judgment on the quality of the lesson that was designed. The focus of the lessons designed by the deregistered teacher was freedom of speech. The content chosen was related to one aspect of Hong Kong’s pro-independence movement. The materials were designed for a Primary 5 class in a subject area for which there is no formal curriculum.

The actual lesson consisted of students watching a video that featured the banned pro-independence Hong Kong National Party, then answering questions based on the video.

01:59

Hong Kong issues unprecedented ban on Andy Chan’s separatist National Party

Hong Kong issues unprecedented ban on Andy Chan’s separatist National Party

Irrespective of the content, this is a questionable approach to lesson preparation and development. First, this is a class of 11-year-olds. Freedom of speech could be a suitable topic but the decision to focus on the pro-independence movement is questionable with regard to students of this age.

Advertisement