[IN RESPONSE TO THE POST OF MR. LAI]

The 9-year compulsory education might impose some incentive for students to “defer” their own graduation from Form 3, but I guess those are minority in numbers ? However, a true school voucher system do indeed address some of the “Minimum Wage” problems that you raised.

The essential spirit of school voucher is to assign public money to the hands of parents and students for them to choose their schools, where each school competes for those money. This implies that schools would have the freedom to choose their service offerings to the market, set their own prices, offer their own salary levels to teachers, assign teachers of different capability to different duties, etc. I guess a significant portion of kindergarten education works like that.

This is just like all schools turn into privately run education service providers where they can run for their own profit. Inefficient schools that nobody choose to use their service will be eliminated from the market, where good schools will thrive with a profit. Better off families may even pay more in addition to the voucher money to bid for better education. Some equality fanatics might argue that good education will be more accessible to rich families. But the point is that, with the current “equality” system, we are “evenly poor” instead of “all gets rich where somebody gets even richer”.

Yes I understand these are too radical for the current system. However, I guess even if with the current constraints of “fixed education funding” for each student, Minimum Wage of teachers etc, a simple version of the school voucher system will improve the secondary school education given that schools can be allowed to expand and contract in their scale, choose the method of education and management in their own way, and teachers can switch job to different schools easily. Efficient schools will be encouraged to recruit more teachers and expand their student population to the point where they can still keep parents choosing them, and inefficient schools will be punished.

Of course, I am not in the education business so the above are bound to be flawed or might be impractical to implement. But we need brainstorming here…

I was told that the money spent on University education for each university graduate is about the same as the tuition fee of top notch universities in the world. I think if the government is willing to hand the funds to the students, they will be very motivated to try to get to schools like Harvard/Yale/Cambridge etc.

[ADDITIONAL NOTE]

There is one additional point I would like to add to this, inspired by a teacher recently.

The teacher complained that his effort is not appreciated by students at all. They often fall asleep in class, and make jokes on teachers. He has difficulty putting the class in order, let alone teaching. He is very demotivated, mainly because of students’ behavior, and partly because of the heavy administrative work that he is burdened with.

So, is it students’ fault of not putting enough effort to their study? I would say not exactly. I lived life for many years and I saw that many of the students that were classified as poorly performing and erratically behaving turned out to be fine human beings. I was one of them indeed, who was rebellion and refused to do my own homework. But I think I classify to be good citizen, eventually.

I think the culprit is the choice of methods of learning. If you’ve ever been a secondary school student in HK, you know what it is about. You learned the text but were discouraged of your own interpretation. You would not be welcomed to challenge the defined line of thinking for a piece of literature (For example, I always think 出師表 is a good material to study the slavery inclination of Chinese, but that won’t help my score). You were asked to memorize stuffs. You need to take biology together with mathematics in order to graduate from form 5 even if you hate biology. You would be damned if you challenge the Keynesian method of boosting the economy by what you read on your brother’s Hayek book, because that was not on the curriculum. If you failed English, your other distinctions won’t count!!

No, I am not saying that students need not share their part of the problem, but rather we should think rationally – students are just human and there must be a reason why they choose to sleep instead of learning in class. Teachers, while blaming students not putting enough effort, should also think about why those students choose to behave that way.

Would a liberal education market help solve the above problem ?