[Andrew WCY]

I couldn't comment on Canada's education system, but I could give a perspective on some problems of Hong Kong's.

During secondary school, native students were learning reading comprehension for classical Chinese in addition to the modern Chinese we use every day. Classical Chinese is a subject that requires a rather high level of proficiency in Chinese to understand the meanings behind each word and passage. It makes use of a wide range of vocabulary we don't normally encounter in day-to-day conversations.

The primary school I got placed into was an English school, where teachers put more emphasis on learning English than Chinese. In those days, native students were not given any training in classical Chinese, and Chinese classes only covered some selected readings from the textbook and writing exercises focused on general topics like writing a letter and describing your hobbies. When I was first exposed to classical Chinese in secondary school, I had a lot of trouble learning its fundamentals, and in spite of the teachers being as helpful as they could, I had a hard time catching up with the others. I admit, language has never been my strongest suit, and that probably had an impact on my learning progress of that subject. But without any early training during my primary school years, the learning barrier was quite high, and learning the basics that late into Hong Kong's curriculum would be a tough task for many to handle.

This brings me to one of my opinions regarding our education system: Students might be given insufficient education on subjects during their early stages of learning, which causes a lack of fundamentals and consequently leads to the presence of learning obstacles in later stages. In my view, much of this problem has to do with an absence of teachers giving education on these subjects in primary schools and too little time being given for students to learn them. This is a problem higher levels of education institution shouldn't be solving and instead should be given to lower levels for taking care of early on. If you take classical Chinese, you're expected to have a good foundation in Chinese, preferably having had done basic reading comprehension exercises on classical Chinese paragraphs. Without this kind of training, it's like a fitness coach telling you to prepare for running a marathon when you don't have a good running form and aren't too fit to begin with.

While one can place part of the blame on the parents for not teaching their children and another part of it on the students for refusing to learn by themselves, I believe it is the schools' fault for not educating students well: A school should be responsible for providing a good and welcoming learning environment for its students; teachers should have the responsibility to help and ensure their students have picked up the fundamentals before moving onto harder subjects; and resources (such as computers for accessing Internet resources and books on relevant classroom topics) should be provided so that students can cultivate their interest in subject areas, gain the skills for self-studying, and ultimately learn by themselves. In such an optimistic scenario, parents shouldn't need to put a lot of time on their children to assist them with catching up with the curriculum, and students would have the ability to search for materials to improve their understanding in subjects. And even in the more realistic situation in which many young students don't have the skills yet for self-learning until much later, we shouldn't be expecting parents to take up too much of the role teachers should have. After all, don't parents send their children to school and pay for their tuition with the belief that teachers could help their children learn well without having the parents themselves doing the bulk of the work?

Another subject of hot debate here in Hong Kong is the existence of the Basic Competency Assessment (BCA), which is a test that evaluates grade 3, 6, and 9 students on their English, Chinese and Mathematics skills in their respective grade levels. The BCA does not affect students' grades and the secondary schools they get allocated to, and is merely a way for the Education Bureau and the schools to gauge the performance of students with respect to their education standards. The scores from the assessment are kept secret amongst the teachers and Education Bureau, so the students have no way of knowing how well they did in the test. Many parents complain that the assessment couldn't be done drilling-free (a feature our Secretary of Education promised), tests skills that students couldn't handle at their levels, and is causing their children a lot of unnecessary stress. The BCA is another version of the Territory-wide System Assessment (TSA) I took, which is essentially the same thing and perhaps with some changes in the testing scope and difficulty of the questions. As I haven't taken the BCA before and only took the TSA, I'll be voicing my opinions on the TSA and how it relates to our education system.

During my studies, we had been given TSA exercises to do, with way more drilling being done during primary school than in secondary school. In primary school, each of us had several sets of TSA exercises being zipped together inside an exercise book cover, and we were periodically tasked with completing them in-class (maybe once every week or so). We eventually finished all of them, and our class teacher handed out another TSA exercise book containing more sets of exercises zipped together. We KO'd that too. After finishing each exercise, the teacher would grade us some days later. They would go through each question and help us understand the mistakes most or several of us made, but one teacher made us stand up if we lost marks in a question (unless the question involves writing an essay) and scolded us for every single mistake we made. None of this happened during secondary school though; we did the exercises very rarely.

The tests don't feel hard for me, and apart from the careless mistakes we made during primary school, all of us had no problem doing the TSA at all. Even though we were told repeatedly that we couldn't make our school 'lose face' by doing poorly in the test during primary school, the training and the actual test itself didn't feel stressful to me. My views on the TSA go against what a lot of parents said about it in the past and what they say about the BCA in the present: The TSA doesn't test students stuff outside of their syllabus; the stress students feel might not be that of the students themselves fearing they can't do the test well, but might be a product of parents and teachers themselves placing too much pressure onto the students; and drilling isn't necessary (at least to the extent of the effort my primary school's teachers did to us), as doing one or two of these exercises should suffice in getting students familiar with the TSA's format. It seems to me the parents are a tad bit too worried about the performance of their children on a test that doesn't affect their chances of admission into secondary schools, and it's the parents' and schools' fault for causing the problem people are complaining about.

TL;DR and conclusion: Hong Kong's primary schools might have problems teaching fundamentals well, and parents and schools place too much stress on students for performing well on proficiency assessments that don't affect their grades.

Feel free to ask me more about this topic and present your opinions on your country's education system. I could give some of my opinions on the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE), the examinations all grade 12 students in the Joint University Programmes Admissions System (JUPAS) need to take to get results that determine whether they could go into university or not.