EDB criticized over minority group failures 2011-10-19 By Andrea Deng (HK Edition) China Daily
A 12-year-old Indian prodigy and his mother criticized the Education Bureau (EDB) on Tuesday for failing to provide any assistance to the boy, seeking placement in a gifted development study program or school.
The boy and his mother contended he was left out of school for more than two years.
Arjun Singh, who was born in Hong Kong, had had difficulty commencing with Grade 1 at a local Chinese school.
He said he was constantly being ordered by teachers to stand outside the classroom, as punishment for asking too many questions.
His later primary school studies were suspended when he was in Grade 5, while attending an international school.
He was told that the school could not upgrade him, and that he should instead go to a gifted school.
Scoring 128 in intelligence quotient, Singh did not find it easy to enrol in secondary schools either.
He approached the Sir Ellis Kadoorie Secondary School and took a form-three examination as recommended by the EDB, only to be told that he could not just jump to Form 3, without showing the results he scored.
But within three months after that, Singh took the IGCSE, or International General Certificate of Secondary Education, and got almost straight A's, demonstrating his capability to be educated at the university level.
Nevertheless, Singh has been out of school since January 2009 when he was only 10. In between, his mother asked for help from the EDB, but the EDB never found a school that offered gifted programs in English.
"For so many years, they (the EDB) never cared that there could be gifted children in the minority groups who have special needs to be satisfied," said Anita Singh, the boy's mother.
The EDB actually did offer choices for Singh, but those were either ordinary ethnic minority schools, or local schools demanding a capability with Chinese, which Singh could not meet.
"They don't understand our needs. Even when we told them that the school was not appropriate for me, they were still insisting on that school," Singh said.
The family was shocked to learn there was a list of schools offering gifted development programs for primary or secondary students, including some English-as-a-medium-of-instruction schools, which the EDB has never broached.
However, Singh is pursuing a university program at present, and preparing for A-Level examinations and the Scholastic Aptitude Test, and will apply to some Ivy League universities in the US, and the University of Hong Kong.
Fermi Wong Wai-fan, executive director of the Hong Kong Unison, who has been assisting Singh, said that once an EDB officer told her that he did not believe that Singh was a gifted child, and that "only his mother thought so".
Wong criticized the EDB for its "lack of care and concern", and its "insensitive attitude that harms the children of ethnic minority".
"They (minority groups) have lesser accessibility of information because they don't speak Cantonese, and so all they can do is to trust the EDB," Wong said.
The EDB said it is offering services and resources to the schools that educate gifted children, and provides suggestions to individual gifted students.
Language issues plague outstanding minority students 2011-10-21 By Andrea Deng (HK Edition) China Daily
Hong Kong's aspirations to become recognized as a focal point for top quality education may be impeded by the absence of effective measures regarding gifted students of ethnic minorities.
In 2010, the number of ethnic students enrolled in university degree programs in Hong Kong was zero, despite the fact that there were many bright and even gifted students from ethnic minorities.
The major issue is that many of these high-calibre students are unable to gain sufficient mastery over the Chinese language.
Thus, they are unable to advance scholastically. Arjun Singh, the 12-year-old Indian prodigy, with an IQ of 129, who scored almost straight A's in the International General Certificate of Secondary Education, would not have been out of school for more than two years, if the Education Bureau (EDB) had referred him to one of the city's English schools that offer gifted programs.
"All I needed from the EDB was just the information on what kind of gifted schools are out there, and a recommendation letter from the EDB. I can take the assessment tests myself. The EDB could be more flexible," said Singh.
Fermi Wong Wai-fun, executive director of Hong Kong Unison, who has been assisting Singh, said she was once told by an EDB officer that Singh's case "is a very new case for the bureau - because Arjun is a member of an ethnic minority."
"We don't have the experience to handle the case," Wong quoted the officer.
The Indian boy is indeed a special case. Although there have been criticisms of the facilities for gifted students, local students can more or less obtain "enrichment classes" to pursue deeper levels of math or science, either at their own school or the courses provided by the Hong Kong Academy for Gifted Education. But nearly all are taught in Chinese.
James Lung Wai-man, an activist for minority children, said that there is no gifted program or facilities in the city's 20-odd ethnic minority schools. Meanwhile, only very few minority children attend local schools that supply enrichment classes.
At the crux of the issue, Lung noted, is the EDB's pedagogical fallacy that "if they (minority children) do not learn Chinese, they are seriously in trouble", because most universities require students to have Chinese capability through the Joint University Programmes Admissions System.
Most minority children fail to learn Chinese well. Their overall scholastic performance is overshadowed by bad grades in Chinese, no matter how well they do in other subjects.
Lung gave an example of a 9-year-old Nepalese boy who loves to write English essays. The boy used to send some of his writing to Chief Executive Donald Tsang and Chief Secretary for Administration Stephen Lam, when Lam was secretary for constitutional and mainland affairs.
But when the boy's father asked the class teacher to help advance the boy in his pursuits, the father was told that the boy should improve his Chinese because he'd been doing poorly in that subject.
"It's ridiculous that a child who is good at English writing is required to be good at Chinese," Lung said.
In Singh's case, he exhibits outstanding caliber in math and has a strong affection for physics, and it does not make much sense to require the boy to be capable of reading Chinese, not to mention that he is fully capable of handling English.
The result of that fallacy is that many minority children being buried by the inability to reading Chinese, Lung said. "Ironically, there are Indian students who don't speak Chinese as well, but can be enrolled in Hong Kong's universities," Lung said.
