The government wants new international schools being granted public land - land that belongs to the people of Hong Kong - to restrict their local student populations to no more than 30 per cent. The proposal, which sounds almost colonial, is supposed to ease high demands for international school places where long queues are apparently deterring talented foreigners and their families from coming to the city.
Let's get real. Given the anaemic growth in the US and the potential break-up of the euro zone, expatriate professionals will come anyway. But, under pressure from the foreign chambers of commerce and their local friends, Education Bureau officials have resurrected a colonial idea. The government seems to think foreign professionals are a breed apart that requires bending over backwards to accommodate. So, let's make sure their children don't have to play with the local children, or only with those from privileged families. That's not internationalism; it's self-imposed apartheid.
Non-Chinese-speaking families deserve subsidised or free education; local parents should have the right to send their children to whatever schools paid for, or subsided, by the government. But what's the solution? It will take time, but gradually open local schools to foreign students by, for example, offering International Baccalaureate programmes, as Diocesan Boys' School and St Paul's Co-educational College - two local direct subsidy schools - have done already. That would improve and overhaul the local system.
And gradually open the international schools and those under the English Schools Foundation to locals and raise their public subsidies, while leaving only a handful of private schools to the super-rich.
Radical? No more international vs local schools? Actually, that's how it's done in most democratic countries.