The tacit dimension of medium of instruction文档.pdfVIP

Cultural Studies@Lingnan 文化研究文化研究@嶺南嶺南 Volume 46 第四十六期 (2015) : 本土派與本土 Article 5 想像 5-1-2015 The tacit dimension of medium of instruction J ia, Jackie LOU Follow this and additional works at : http://commons.ln. du.hk/mcsln Part of th Critical and Cultural Studi s Commons R comm nd d Citation Lou, J. J. (2015). The tacit dim nsion of m dium of instruction. Cultural Studi s@Lingnan, 46. R tri v d from http://commons.ln. du.hk/mcsln/vol46/iss1/5/ This 文化評論 Criticism is brought to you for fr e and op n acc ss by the D partm nt of Cultural Studi s at Digital Commons @ Lingnan Univ rsity. It has b n acc pt d for inclusion in Cultural Studi s@Lingnan 文化研究@嶺南 by an authoriz d administrator of Digital Commons @ Lingnan Univ rsity. The Tacit Dimension of Medium of Instruction Lou Jia Jackie The medium of instruction has long been a controversial problem in Hong Kong. Although the British colonized the territory in 1842, the colonial government did not have an official language policy until the Official Language Ordinance of 1974, and it was left to the principal of each school to decide whether teaching should be conducted in Chinese or English (Bolton 2002). Representative of the “non-interventionist” policies of moderate imperialism (Arendt 1966), British colonial educators, who established mission schools in Hong Kong in the mid-nineteenth century favored Chinese as the language of education for local pupils. Central School founder Frederic Steward said “Schools should be secular and give strong support to Chinese education” (Pennycook 1998, 109). However, the liberal views of these early British educators, who themselves were interested in the study of Oriental languages