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First, regarding perspective and frame of reference:- I commenced my doctoral studies at the University of Hong Kong in June 1996.
When I was still new in Hong Kong, one day my Head of Department sent me to
the airport to meet a British visitor, an eminent scholar in education and the then
Dean of the Graduate School at the Institute of Education of the University of
London. As a young man who had just been out of the mainland, I was struck by
the huge differences in my eye between Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland at
the time. On the way from the airport to the Robert Black College where the
British professor stayed, I asked her if she thought Hong Kong was a Chinese
society. Understandably, her answer was positive and immediate. - In 2002, I was in Hong Kong again after 5 years of study and work in Australia.
I was invited to deliver a seminar at the City University of Hong Kong where I
told the audience that Hong Kong in my view was indeed a Chinese society.
Second, as for knowledges, their sociocultural contexts and politics: - In the early 1980s when China’s university enrolment rate was well below 3%, I
was a junior student then. One day one of my classmates was preparing for the
semester exam. He tried to recite Lenin’s definition of matter.^1 We then had some
discussions at the dormitory about how to understand the definition. When I
pointed to a chair in the room as an example of matter, I was laughed by my
roommates. - In 1993, I visited a primary school at a well-developed coastal city in Guangdong,
China. A class of grade one were having a quiz. One question was how the sky
looked like with four choices: dark, gray, blue, and bright. Some pupils looked
out of the window at the sky and ticked gray as the answer. Their answer was
graded wrong because the standard answer was blue, even if the sky in China’s
coastal areas had already been much polluted by then and indeed looked gray. - In 2014, I visited Guangxi Normal University at the picturesque Guilin city in
China. The Faculty of Education organized a special discussion session between
their professors and myself. The Associate Dean (research) remarked that in their
everyday teaching and research, Chinese educational history could hardly come
in, while Western history of education could fairly easily. - In 2004, I was sent to Singapore to teach a Master of Education course of the
international programs offered by the Faculty of Education at Monash University.
I encouraged the students to cite published works by local authors in both English
and Chinese when they prepared for their essays. One student formally com-
plained to my Dean that the suggestion was “ridiculous.” Fortunately, I had an
open-minded Dean and she simply laughed off the complaint.
(^1) Today, Chinese students continue to recite the definition: “Matter is a philosophical category
denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photo-
graphed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them” (Lenin 1962 ,
p.130).
R. Ya ng