Education Reform: Position of Art and Physical Education

On 19 July 2000, two senior curriculum officers resigned, after failing to change the view of the Education Commission on the status of Arts and Sport in the secondary school curriculum.

Under the current education reform, Sports and Arts are only defined as the elective subjects while Chinese, English, Mathematics, Integrated Science and Information Technology and Integrated Humanistic are set as the compulsory subjects. Besides, teachers who teach sports, music and arts in secondary schools are not required to hold any qualification for those subjects. More importantly, the current reform does not set up a learning ladder for arts and sports in strengthening their status in Hong Kong education.  For these reasons, two senior curriculum officers who are responsible for designing new curriculum of Arts and Sport decide to resign in order to demonstrate their dissatisfaction against the reform.

Their dissatisfaction gains sympathy, at least from me. In Hong Kong education system, arts and sport are downplayed seriously. For students, arts and sports are only classes which give them a room for relaxing or playing. They do not care the academic results of Sport and Arts, which do not affect the future entry into the University. Besides, teachers who teach but do not respect Arts and Sports fail to deliver skills with strong enthusiasm to students. With respect to arts education, even the main spirit of Arts- self-expression- cannot be conveyed to students. With three years of Arts Education, a majority of students only know they have submitted arts assignments to teachers.

For physical education, teaching a wide-variety of sport skills is rare if teachers do not respect sport. In classes teachers mainly lead students to do warm-up. Most of the time, students are allowed to play freely. Definitely students prefer to have more free time in playing their favorable sport. After several years of physical education, students only release uncountable liters of sweating but fail to learn the skills and recognize the importance of physical education. 

Arts and Physical Education might have not ever existed in Hong Kong education system. Perhaps, the sport and arts lectures are only relaxing times. If the Education Commission still does not recognize Arts and Sport are the integral parts of the education system, as if arts expression and physical ability are integral to human character, the Commission has to be held responsible for suppressing the full development of human potential. Why do the Hong Kong education only put a high value on training and testing our intellectual ability? Is it because our expressive and physical ability are worthless in Hong Kong economy?

Despite the abolishment of Academic Aptitude Test and other redundant public examinations,  the Education Commission seem to fail to draw out a blue plan which lead to more fruitful and all-round learning space for students. At least the reform cannot recognize Arts and Sport as an integral part of the whole education curriculum. Boldly speaking, even if the commission defines Arts and Sport education as the compulsory curriculum, I still doubt whether teachers can convey the spirit and skills of Arts and Sport to students. Perhaps we should ask one more question, could teachers really have the stamina in teaching if they find it difficult to control the 40 students' class order?