Hong Kong tells parents to cooperate with schools to enhance children’s national identity
Hong Kong Free Press
Hong Kong’s Education Bureau (EDB) has called on parents to cooperate with schools to help heighten their children’s sense of national identity.
In a document released on Tuesday on parents’ engagement in children’s learning, the EDB said parents played a significant role in boosting adolescents’ national identity.
“Parents should understand how national education is promoted in schools so as to support their adolescent children’s learning in daily life,” the EDB wrote under a section titled “Developing identities, particularly national identity through National
Education and National Security Education.”
The bureau recommended that parents encourage their children to join activities at schools related to the Basic Law and national security, such as talks and mainland China exchange programmes.
“Students can learn the importance of safeguarding national security and enhance their sense of national identity and national pride through real-life and interesting activities,” the bureau wrote.
The Curriculum Framework on Parent Education (Secondary School) was written based on suggestions by an EDB taskforce examining “home-school co-operation and parent education.”
The framework for the parents of children in kindergarten was published in 2021, and the one for parents of primary school children was released in 2022.
Ahead of the publication of the secondary school framework, lawmakers expressed concern that the taskforce’s recommendations – made over five years ago before the protests and unrest in 2019 – did not take into account the “changing social circumstances thereafter.”
Lawmakers suggested that “elements of national and national security education should be incorporated into the strategies for promoting parent education.”
The kindergarten framework does not mention national security or patriotic education. The framework for primary school parents, however, says parents and schools should work together and educate children on the rule of law so they can “contribute to the country’s development.”
Chief Executive John Lee announced during his Policy Address last year that authorities would provide a HK$200,000 grant to secondary schools for school-based parent education activities.
Since Beijing passed a national security law in Hong Kong in June 2020 following months of protests, the EDB has enhanced programmes relating to patriotic education.
Last November, the bureau introduced a subject called Primary Humanities – to be taught to students as young as those in Primary One – that includes topics such as the city’s social development, Chinese culture and significant historical events, and China’s achievements. The subject will be piloted in the coming school year.
Authorities have also called on schools to remove books that endanger national security, as well as added a “sense of national identity” to requirements for aspiring school principals.
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