With the subject set to start in primary schools, thousands protest at government headquarters
(From SCMP, September 2, 2012) Tens of thousands of people opposed to
national education lessons, due to begin tomorrow in primary schools, rallied last night outside government headquarters in Admiralty.
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| Pictured by Joseph Lee |
Among them, three teenagers were forced to bring their hunger strike to an early end on health grounds. But 10 others - university students, a parent, teachers and a professor - began a
hunger strike due to last until tomorrow.
Organisers, who put the number of protestors last night at 40,000 called for another protest tomorrow at the same spot. Earlier, police put the crowd at more than 8,100.
Many parents, with children in tow, gathered outside the headquarters to make their feelings known on national education - a subject the government says will instil national pride but which protestors dismiss as a brainwashing tool.
Three members of protest group
Scholarism were forced to bring a planned 72-hour hunger strike to an end 16 hours early, at midnight. The three, Lily Wong Lee-lee, Ivan Lam Long-yin and another student calling himself Kaiser, defied a request by
Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor to start eating again yesterday morning.
She told them they had made their point, and that the government was offering schools enough
flexibility in teaching national education.
Campaigners used colourful games to
argue against the national education programme, which will be
compulsory at primary level from 2015 and in secondary classrooms from 2016.
Social worker Kung Si-man twisted ballons to resemble an assortment of animals. "We want children to know they have the freedom to choose what they like, and they don't have to accept everything that is forced on them," she said.
Volunteer Jenny Luk Mei-wai ran a
booth that hung up questions on Chinese geography gleaned from the existing secondary school textbooks. One intermediate-level question was: what is the largest Chinese
province that also shares a border with the most countries? Answer: Xinjiang. "We want to show that our current school
curriculum already offers a lot of the topics that they say national education will teach," she said.
Hazel Pang Tsz-tsun, 10, explored a village made of card-board that was intended to remind visitors of a dark period in China's recent past. She was invited to shake one of the houses while her younger brother was inside, as an example of "tofu"buildings that collapsed, due to shoddy construction, in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
"Because there is brainwashing in China, when the earthquake struck people didn't realise that many deaths actually occurred because the government did not build the houses property," she said.
Other messages of protest were written on eggshells. "The children are like eggs, they young and have
fragile shells," said 28-year-old Ivy Ip Wai-min, an architect who was visiting the gathering with her boyfriend.
Glossary
- argue against 提出理據
- booth 攤位
- Chief Secretary 政務司
- compulsory 強迫性
- curriculum 課程
- flexibility 彈性
- fragile 易碎的
- hunger strike 絕食
- national education 國民教育
- province 省份
- Scholarism 學民思潮
