Childhood education - our future?

Irrelevant introduction

There are a total of four pillars in the Trafalgar square. Alongside Lord Nelson, are four pillars with the statues of King George IV, Sir Charles Napier and Sir Henry Havelock. Yes- we are missing one of them. At the current moment, it showcases a sculpture called "Powerless Structures, Fig. 101".

Powerless Structures, Fig.101 by Loz Flowers

An excerpt of the caption thus reads:

"... the work references the traditional monuments in the square, but, with its golden shine, it celebrates generations to come... We wanted to create a public sculpture which, rather than dealing with topics of victory or defeat, honours the every battles of growing up."

This shows how these Englishman see the importance of our future generations - they raise the depiction of our future generations to the status of historical heroes.

Childhood educators

Childhood education is important[1]. The thing is, whether you believe in the critical period hypothesis or not, the golden rule in language acquisition is still the earlier the better. The problem[2] with childhood education in Hong Kong is the utter neglect of it by the government.

Face it, the average parent in Hong Kong is not that sort of well-educated parent we are seeing in the advertisements (e.g. of HSBC) - look at the statistics - the average boy in Hong Kong doing HKCEE (although it is now historical, this represents what we have in the society for at least a decade-worth of men) would not pass all the three core subjects (Chinese, English and Mathematics).

And then we need kindergarten[3], and some of us may believe in the supposition that these quasi-educators in the kindergartens are better qualified than these apparently academically not-so-competent dads and moms. And perhaps we are wrong - at least for our generation. The minimum qualification, back in the years when the now-working generation were kindergarten pupils, for kindergarten teachers is that of finishing Form 3. The requirement has since changed to five passes in HKCEE (and still not requiring a pass in mathematics).

I suppose our children deserve better education. It is time we actually examine what is going on in the kindergartens rather than trying the best of our luck in applying for the best kindergartens judged by their associations with the international primary schools...

Recommendations?

In the form of replying a specialty consultation, may I suggest:

(1) Raising the salary for all education posts such as kindergarten, primary and secondary teachers to improve the competitiveness in the job market.
(2) Mandatory language assessment for all childhood educators (to the likings of LPAT in primary and secondary teachers) - our children are looking at them for INPUTS during their critical (or early if you insist) years.

I am not asking for much - a pass in CAE or CPE would be quite sufficient - and mind you, we had that passed in our matriculation years.

[1] If you believe that a citation here would be useful, go here. I believe in the contrary.
[2] If there were no problems then I wouldn't have written this.
[3] To be honest, this is probably not the reason for the existence of kindergartens, and even with the universal tertiary education in taiwan, things are much better looking either.