Letters | How Hong Kong is letting down STEM whiz-kids
- Readers wonder why the city is holding back STEM talent with non-STEM requirements, and discuss how to better integrate ethnic minority youth into Hong Kong
The results of India’s Joint Entrance Examination (Advanced) are out. A young man named Vavilala Chidvilas Reddy from Hyderabad is the top scorer. He will get into the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, which supplies some of the world’s best engineers.
I’m not sure if he will be a poet too, but he has a high chance of becoming a distinguished engineer. India is fostering STEM geniuses. Does it make a difference whether these young men and women are also up to par in the humanities or foreign languages?
Hong Kong might produce a lot more engineers, programmers and scientists if we tweak the minimum requirements for publicly funded undergraduate programmes. Our Vavilalas must thrive, without having to worry whether they can also ace non-STEM subjects.
Ken Chan, Tsing Yi
Teach Chinese history to ethnic minority students
Ethnic minorities in Hong Kong are often mistakenly regarded as only the South Asians who are part of the city’s colonial legacy. But we also have large contingents of Filipinos, Vietnamese, Indonesians, Anglo-Saxons and lately Africans, not to mention people of mixed races and children of intermarriages.
However, only a limited number of government or government-aided schools admit ethnic minority children in large numbers willingly. The likes of Li Cheng Uk Government Primary School, Sir Ellis Kadoorie Primary School and Secondary School, and Islamic Kasim Tuet Memorial College are the better-known ones, while the Delia Group of Schools and Confucius Hall Secondary School also accommodate ethnic minorities.
Nevertheless, these schools do not impose a compulsory Chinese subject on these students in their Diploma of Secondary Education exam year, but let them take the much easier International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) Chinese paper purely to enable them to apply for university locally. This does not help young ethnic minorities develop a sense of Chinese national identity, and they may feel like passers-by in Hong Kong.
I urge schools and the Education Bureau to teach all students Chinese and Chinese history at the same level, so these students know they belong here.
At around 620,000, the ethnic minority population is quickly reaching 10 per cent of our total population. Ethnic minorities are part of Hong Kong’s talent pool and they make Hong Kong a truly diverse and multicultural city. We need them in our participation in the Belt and Road Initiative.
Joseph Chan, chairman, Silk Road Economic Development Research Centre
