473Book reviews / International Journal of Educational Development 21 (2001) 471–476

out life? Learning throughout life? All such possi-bilities?” It moves on to disentangle some of thechanging usages of terminology, based on chang-ing international perceptions of education; it looksat ideas and the practice of fundamental andelementary education, including adult, literacy andout-of-school education. This chapter has a helpfuldiscussion of changes in views on literacy, and alsothe challenge of the Faure Report (1972) to pre-occupations with linear expansion of educationprovision without attention to quality, as well aswith “education” rather than “ learning” .

The third chapter is called, a bit misleadingly,An expanding vision, since it is mainly a concisedepiction of what has happened in educationworldwide since 1950—a dramatic expansion inboth secondary and tertiary education, somereduction in the gender gap and, in most parts ofthe world, a reduction in adult illiteracy. It is sober-ing, still, to read that there are more illiterate adultsin 2000 (an estimated 875 million) than in 1950(705 million), although the proportion hasdecreased. It is particularly sobering too to seeonce more the familiar picture of educational dis-advantage in sub-Saharan Africa. Expanded visiondoes emerge in the final chapter on education’spurposes at the present time. It is underlined thatprovision of education as a right cannot be simplyquantitative, but must be about purposes and con-tent. Curricula relate, therefore, to “peace, humanrights, democracy” and/or to “development” . Thelatest trend is identified as “ the democratization ofeducational choice” .

The report is very well written and has quarried,in the text and in “boxes” , many of the importantinternational documents on the title theme. Theauthors have an eye for the telling quotation (e.g.the comment of the 1966 World Survey of Edu-cation: “Admission to higher education is not a sin-gle act, but a process covering all the years of edu-cation” , and Amartya Sen’s blast against humancapital theory). They could be criticised for notmaking more of some of UNESCO’s contributions;there is, surprisingly, no mention of the sterlingwork done by the International Institute for AdultLiteracy Methods. In addition, the report has thefailing of most major UN agencies, of referringvery little to the evolution of ideas in other UN

agencies (even those mentioned as partners in theEducation for All project).

It is to the authors’ credit that they have notshirked some of the sore questions, especially theretreat from ideas of free education. Their finalsentences read: “For the persons still excluded alto-gether from education, however, there is of courseno ‘choice’ , indeed among many perhaps not eventhe knowledge that they ought to have a choice.Yet, if their inherent dignity and claim to the ‘equaland inalienable rights’ that belong to all are betterrecognized today by the rest of the world than theywere fifty years ago, this is surely an indication thatprogress has been made towards implementationof the right to education” . Balanced and free fromwindiness, this is an unusually readable report.

Readability is, of course, not what one looks forin World Data on Education. This is a referencework, providing descriptions of the structure of144 national educational systems (the first guide,published by the International Bureau of Educationin 1979 collected material on 85 countries). It alsoincludes some comparative statistics focusing inthis edition on primary education. It shows the useof the IBE as an “observatory of educational struc-tures, content and methods,” but it also reminds usof the saying that data is to knowledge as a pileof bricks to a skyscraper. Here we have a goodlypile of bricks, some of which have been helpful inWorld Education 2000—which if not a skyscraperis an edifice. Both reports, in entirely differentways, do credit to UNESCO.

Prof. Lalage Bown1 Dogpole Court, Dogpole,

Shrewsbury, Shropshire SY1 1ES, UK

8 January 2001

PII: S0738- 05 93 (01)00 00 3- 7

Changing the Curriculum: The impact ofreform on primary schooling in Hong KongBob Adamson, Tammy Kwan and Ka-ki Chan(Eds.); Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong,2000, pp. 332, Price US$25, ISBN 962-209-522-4.

Proposals for sweeping changes to the educationsystem have become central to the post-1997

474 Book reviews / International Journal of Educational Development 21 (2001) 471–476

government’s programme for making Hong Kong‘Asia’s world city, and a major city in China’ .These proposals presume the need for a clean slatein education, if Hong Kong is to foster the skills ofcreativity, critical thinking and ‘ lifelong learning’considered necessary for it to prosper in ‘ theknowledge economy’ . This book questions the wis-dom of such an apocalyptic approach to edu-cational reform, not by focusing on the currentdebate, which has yet to reach a clear outcome, butby examining the most recent previous attempt atlarge-scale reform of the local system of schooling:the drive to promote a ‘Target Oriented Curricu-lum’ (TOC).

The TOC policy, in one form or another, was atthe heart of the government’s educational agendaduring the final decade of British rule. Since HongKong’s retrocession, the new administration, eagerto distance itself from its colonial predecessor, hasappeared to sideline or even abandon TOC. How-ever, this book demonstrates that the reforms pro-posed since 1997, despite their trumpeted radical-ism and novelty, in fact encompass many of theaims of TOC.

TOC was the most ambitious government effortto change the local school curriculum. Rapidexpansion of educational provision at primary andsecondary level during the 1970s and 1980s hadinvolved no significant changes to the curriculum.Elitism, and a strongly traditional academicemphasis, remained ingrained in the system,reinforced in particular by the Academic AptitudeTest (AAT) taken by all students in their last yearof primary school. The AAT tests students’ abili-ties in Maths, Chinese and English, and — like theold ‘eleven-plus’ in England — determines whatkind of secondary school they can go to, thus inlarge measure also determining their future lifechances.

TOC aimed to change the nature of pedagogy —first in primary schools, and ultimately in second-ary schools as well — by encouraging teachers toabandon what was widely seen as an outdated andundesirable emphasis on ‘chalk and talk’ , whole-class instruction, rote memorisation and summativeassessment. Instead, teachers were urged to adopta ‘pupil-centred’ teaching style involving greaterreliance on group work and use of formative

assessment methods. It was hoped that thesechanges would produce a shift from a pedagogyseen as stressing the largely uncritical amassing oflarge quantities of received knowledge, to onewhich aimed primarily at fostering students’ learn-ing skills.

The TOC policy was thus initially posited ona vision of education in Hong Kong that saw littleof value in prevailing teaching practices, andsought to replace these with methods of a rad-ically different nature. As this book demon-strates, however, the policy was characterised byvagueness and confusion, amongst EducationDepartment (ED) officials as well as in schools,as to the specific practical changes that theachievement of this vision would involve. AsPaul Morris puts it in the second chapter, theimpact of the TOC reform exhibited the ‘Rasho-mon effect’ — there were as many differentinterpretations of it as there were officials andteachers involved in its implementation. The casestudies contained in this book show the varied,unpredictable and often unintended outcomeswhich resulted from the reform. In one school, astaff-room revolt against the headmaster’ s effortsto promote his vision of TOC had the effect ofboosting teachers’ professionalism, and creatinga greater sense of collegiality within the school.Within the Education Department, while theEnglish Section embraced the emphasis on pupil-centred teaching and group work, the changesmade to official teaching guidelines for Mathsand Chinese were more perfunctory.

Although this book reflects much of the criticismlevelled by schools and teachers at the Departmentfor its failure to provide more detailed and coherentguidelines, the very vagueness of the TOC initiat-ive paradoxically emerges as one of the mainreasons for its relative effectiveness in bringingabout curriculum change. This was, Morris argues,a result of the fact that for much of the 1990s, ‘ insome schools and for some teachers, TOC providedan external source of legitimacy and material sup-port for improving the quality of schooling thatwent beyond the exhortations and platitudes thathave characterised other [education reform] initiat-ives in Hong Kong’ . The authors conclude that, inthe most successful instances, what resulted was a

475Book reviews / International Journal of Educational Development 21 (2001) 471–476

hybrid of elements of TOC and existing teachingmethods, involving ‘ interactive whole-class teach-ing’ and a blend of summative and formativeassessment methods, that was probably moreappropriate to local conditions than the idealisedpupil-centred model envisaged in the original pol-icy papers.

The subsequent sidelining of TOC has severelydamaged the motivation of those who wereinvolved in promoting it, as well as their faith inthe sincerity of government efforts to reform edu-cation. The government is therefore strongly criti-cised here for its ‘seduction and abandonment’ ofteachers. Moreover, many of the lessons of TOChave not been learnt by the new administration.Although the crucial issues of the reform of publicexaminations are beginning to be addressed, manyaspects of the new government’s education policyreveal the mounting ‘disarticulation’ of its policy-making processes. For instance, while the pro-motion of mother-tongue (i.e. Cantonese-medium)rather than English-medium instruction remainsofficial policy, it is also officially stated thatPutonghua should be adopted as the medium ofinstruction for Chinese ‘ in the long term’ .

The government is also learning the hard waysomething that its colonial predecessor appreci-ated only too well: that an administration with nopopular mandate, that is unwilling or unable toemploy coercive measures, is severely con-strained in its ability to impose controversialreforms. The authors emphasise that by portray-ing the teaching profession collectively as reac-tionary dinosaurs, rather than treating them aspartners in the search for improvements to thelocal education system, the current administrationhas needlessly alienated the group most vital tothe success of any reform.

The authors of this book have supplied a power-ful and timely critique of the government’s dis-missive and condescending attitude towardsschools and teachers, and its unhealthy penchantfor millenarian reforming rhetoric backed up byincoherent planning and insufficient resources.Nevertheless, while the criticisms thus levelled atpolicy-makers are by and large justified, thisreviewer feels that more criticism should perhapsalso have been reserved for the local teaching pro-

fession – or at least for its leaders. The ProfessionalTeachers’ Union (PTU) is one of the most power-ful professional associations in Hong Kong, butrather than seeking to supply constructive sugges-tions for educational improvement, it has perfor-med an almost exclusively reactive, conservativerole. The PTU receives no mention in this book,though it would have been interesting to knowwhether it took any stance on TOC and, if so, whatthat stance was. Neither does the absence or weak-ness of subject associations (for Maths, English orChinese teachers) receive any discussion. Thepolitical posturing of the PTU especially begs thequestion of who is more to blame: the governmentfor failing to listen to teachers, or teachers for col-lectively failing to articulate any distinctive visionof Hong Kong’s educational future?

Regarding broader comparisons between ‘Asian’and ‘Western’ pedagogical practices, the messageof the book is less clear or consistent. Morris notesin Chapter 2 that the TOC drew liberally uponexternal, largely British, Australian and New Zea-land precedents, but he argues that the experienceof TOC provides no grounds to infer an ‘East’ -‘West’ cultural clash, and dismisses the notion that‘ the assumptions underlying TOC were fundamen-tally in conflict with a set of values about schoolingwhich were distinctly derived from Chinese orAsian culture’ . However, Ference Marton’s lucidand thought-provoking ‘Afterword’ , appears totake a contradictory line, based on different prem-ises regarding the nature of ‘culture’ and the impli-cations of cultural difference. Marton characterisesTOC as ‘very much a Western thought-package’ ,and clearly implies that it was therefore in certainrespects in conflict with Hong Kong pedagogy —‘an offspring of Chinese pedagogy, the oldest andmaybe the most efficient pedagogy (in its moreadvanced forms) of which we know’ . An evenmore tendentious assertion is made by Mun-lingLo when she writes, ‘Unlike their Western counter-parts, primary school heads in Hong Kong enjoygreat authority. The Asian culture is such that tea-chers respect their school heads and generally sub-mit to their authority without question…’ . Westernreaders may wonder which ‘Western counterparts’she has in mind.

Nevertheless the book as a whole reads clearly

476 Book reviews / International Journal of Educational Development 21 (2001) 471–476

and fluently, and the multiplicity of perspectivessupplied by the various authors generally comp-lement, rather than contradict, each other. Theymake this the most comprehensive, thoughtful andpenetrating work available on curriculum changein Hong Kong. While it makes a very importantcontribution to the international literature on cur-riculum reform, this book will hopefully receiveparticular attention from local educational policy-

makers, for whom it constitutes a perfect objectlesson in formative assessment.

Edward VickersComparative Education Research Centre,

The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road,Hong Kong, China

E-mail address: edwardFvickers@hotmail.com

PII: S0738- 05 93 (01)00 02 3- 2