The best students will learn English’

Ultra‐utilitarianism and linguistic imperialism in education in post‐1997 Hong Kong

Bibliographic Data

ID11489126
AuthorsPo King Choi (corresponding author)
Year2003
Volume18
Issue6
Pages673-694
Publication date2003-12-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Education Policy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0268-0939 • E-ISSN: 1464-5106
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0268093032000145917
OpenAlexW1972295246
LanguageEN
Citations received35
References cited2

In September 1997, shortly after China resumed sovereignty over Hong Kong, the Education Department announced a policy which was widely seen as a restoration of 'mother-tongue education', but which, in reality, was an elitist language selection policy. This policy, which provided for the selection of the best primary school graduates for monolingual education in English, was designed to be a cost-effective way of training in English skills for those who had the economic and cultural capital to benefit from it. Meanwhile, the majority of students were barred from sufficient exposure to English, the language of power and wealth. In this paper, I shall show that this policy draws on a strong utilitarian discourse about the centrality of English for the economic survival of Hong Kong, which was engineered by business interests on the eve of the changeover in 1997, and which helped perpetuate a form of linguistic imperialism. Meanwhile, academics whose research was used to legitimize the policy, failed to problematize dominant language ideologies that have been used to justify pedagogically unsound practices and an inequitable language streaming policy. Through documenting the voices of individual educators, I am able to delineate counter-discourses which, albeit weak and isolated, nevertheless manifested much broader educational concerns than the narrow utilitarianism and the unquestioned privileging of the learning of English skills that underlay the current policy. [Copyright of Journal of Education Policy is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0268093032000145917]

Education policy · First language · Higher education · Ideology · Language policy · Linguistics · Pedagogy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Sovereignty · Utilitarianism · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · Law · Multilingual Education and Policy · Second Language Learning and Teaching

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub