Sy Hon Ming says teachers should give students the knowledge and tools to become truth-seekers, but the Professional Teachers’ Union and the Civil Human Rights Front failed in this regard.
People walk past the entrance of the Hong Kong Professional Teachers' Union in Hong Kong, Aug 10, 2021. (VINCENT YU / AP)
The recent disbanding of the Professional Teachers’ Union sounded the alarm to local teachers whose political compass remains pointed to the West. The termination of the PTU, which plagued Hong Kong’s education system as well as generations of students for years, demonstrates yet again that the best way to fix a problem is usually the simplest one. The removal of a big roadblock, i.e., the PTU, has paved the way for the reintroduction of the long-overdue national education as a required primary and secondary school subject when the new academic year starts, and ensures it will never be blocked again by separatists.
Meanwhile, an even more-harmful political entity announced its own dissolution last week. The Civil Human Rights Front, which was an illegal organization for 15 years without registration with the SAR government according to relevant laws, called it quits so that its leaders can try to save their own skins somehow. And it is by no means the last of them by the look of it.
Many concerned citizens in our city have sensed that Hong Kong is turning a new page in socioeconomic development, with the education system reform and curriculum shakeup as the harbinger of many more urgent corrections in the pipeline. Local teachers deserve a well-organized, law-abiding and caring union to properly represent their interests, which the PTU largely neglected.
Good education requires educators to adhere to a professional code of conduct based on the rule of law and public consensus.
The PTU, obsessed with Western ideologies, harbored irreconcilable hostility toward the country’s political system. Over the years, the operatives of PTU put their political obsession over the best interest of its members, turning the originally professional body into a subversive political organization.
It has successfully brainwashed thousands of young students with toxic ideas over the past two decades, turning them into foot soldiers to execute the opposition camp’s political agenda for Hong Kong, which is to ultimately turn the special administrative region into an independent political entity. For the great harm it had inflicted on Hong Kong society, the group has been rightly likened to a malignant tumor.
ALSO READ: With PTU dissolved, it's time for HK education to recover
The disbandment action was widely seen as an attempt to shirk whatever legal responsibility the leaders of the group might have to face when the ongoing police investigation gets to the bottom of the group’s subversive enterprise. But it was a futile attempt. The rule of law requires that the police continue with the investigation and bring those who are guilty to justice.
The departure of subversive groups is inevitable after the promulgation of the National Security Law for Hong Kong on June 30 last year. And public sentiment had been increasingly hostile toward the PTU as more and more of its evil deeds were exposed.
Over the past year, the education sector has been gradually adapting to the era of NSL-awareness. The Education Bureau issued the Circular No. 3/2021 “National Security: Maintaining a Safe Learning Environment Nurturing Good Citizens” in February, providing guidelines for schools to implement education on the NSL. The circular states that teachers play a crucial role in “imparting knowledge and nurturing students’ character”, and that the fundamentals of NSL education are to develop students’ sense of belonging to their motherland and shouldering the responsibility to serve the country.
This guideline, in a way, reflects the need to eradicate the harmful influence of the PTU and boost the education system’s immunity to politicization. The public consensus is also building that it is high time Hong Kong society wiped out the toxicity left by those subversive and/or separatist groups — essentially by strengthening national education for our children and youth.
For example, the Baptist University of Hong Kong has decided to incorporate national security education in its mandatory curriculum when the new academic year begins. The BUHK is the first local school to take this important step toward instilling a stronger sense of patriotism and national security in students for the sake of safeguarding their own well-being as well as the public interest in general. It is also crucial to ensuring the healthy and constructive existence of the tertiary education sector in line with Article 10 of the National Security Law, which requires all local schools to provide students with national security education. Some politically motivated individuals accused this policy of infringing upon academic freedom at institutions of higher learning, in an apparent attempt to defend anti-China brainwashing designed to facilitate the “containment strategy” of the US-led Western powers. Such hypocritical ranting only confirms that the HKSAR government is doing the right thing with local universities these days.
READ MORE: No subversive group survives HK's security law
Let's revisit a shining example of Chairman Mao’s wisdom to “seek truth from facts.” It was first espoused in the 1930s and later emphasized by Deng Xiaoping in a speech in 1978. Deng stated that the only way to pursue Chinese socialist modernization smoothly was to “emancipate our minds, seek truth from facts, and proceed from reality in everything.” It remains absolutely true today and should stay in our minds as long as we live, in addition to guiding our decision-making process on a daily basis. Good education requires educators to adhere to a professional code of conduct based on the rule of law and public consensus. Educators should be truth-seekers who have an eye for facts, not fiction. A good teacher gives students the necessary knowledge and tools to become truth-seekers themselves when they graduate. The likes of the PTU and the CHRF did the opposite. That’s why they must go for good.
Sy Hon Ming Edmond is vice-chairman and the public relationships and Communication Committee deputy director of the Hong Kong CPPCC Youth Association.