Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Moral, Civic and National Education

There is certainly a lot of complaints surrounding this subject in Hong Kong.

According to the EDB,

Moral, Civic and National Education is an essential element of whole-person education which aims at fostering students' positive values and attitudes through the school curriculum and the provision of diversified learning experiences. It also develops students' ability to analyse and judge issues relating to personal, family, social, national and global issues at different developmental stages, and enhances their willingness to make commitment and contribution.

My personal belief is that whereas this MNE may as well be a rather political scheme of introducing the ruling government in a more pleasant manner to students in Hong Kong, this is actually a "good thing". 

The past decade of Hong Kong has been in a media-guided turmoil - citizens had generally been led into a exercise of voicing out all sorts of negative emotions. Children these days learn from the media that anything they have the freedom of speech - they can voice out anything that is unfair (or they so opined). What is wrong with this, one may ask?

The problem is that they don't quite understand the situation before they even speak.

If somebody go on to ask the secondary and university students of Hong Kong on whether they support democracy, chances are they are going to get quite a majority support. What is missing in this question is whether they KNOW what is democracy. You hear Raymond saying Aristotle in the morning, Immanuel Kant in the nighttime in a day, and Confucius in another day. How many of their books have these  secondary and tertiary students read to form their opinion of supporting democracy? My experience with secondary and tertiary students has been extremely poorly informed in political ideologies - not to mention the philosophical background of them.

If anything, this MNE will likely stimulate the learning of students on this subject and our society will benefit from it. Knowledge is power!

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