Anxious students’ mental distress may have political cause

Lau Nai-keung wonders whether our depressed, fretful youngsters are merely spoiled, and if some teachers’ radical inclinations could be to blame

Strange but true. A study has found that only a quarter of Hong Kong secondary-school students display signs of anxiety. One would have thought the numbers should be higher, but they are not; the study was on the news however because apparently this is still too high for our fragile youth population. The survey by Baptist Oi Kwan Social Service surveyed 15,560 pupils in Form 1 to 6 at 37 schools across Hong Kong. It also found 53 percent of the surveyed students displayed symptoms of depression. That figure was higher than the 51 percent recorded in the 2014-15 academic year, the 50 percent in 2013-14 and 51 percent in 2012-13, when the same study was carried out.

What does 50 to 53 percent over four years mean? First, it means the occurrence of depression is quite consistent. The difference from year to year is probably not even statistically significant. And what does it mean if almost half of the students are always depressed? It means either our education system is very sick, or being depressed doesn’t mean anything.

I tend to believe the last explanation is true. If statistics are to be trusted, Hong Kong’s schools are not only super competitive academically, but also the most densely populated with bullies. As a quote by a fellow writer in this paper states, about 70.8 percent of 1,800 pupils from eight local secondary schools polled by the Department of Social Work at the Chinese University of Hong Kong between January and April said they had been victims of school violence, slightly higher than in the West and Asian regions.

Depression and bullying are no joking matter and they should be taken care of by professionals but we must beware of the chance that our children are just spoiled.

Nowadays, it is probably quite trendy to be depressed, or to be bisexual, or to identify with any one of Facebook’s 71 gender options as long as it is not man or woman.

Earlier this year, the focus was on the rising number of student suicides. Again, our education system is to blame.

“Going to school was like going to prison,” Chan Yu-ling, a fourth-grade primary school student, who gave her testimony when the city’s legislature convened a special session to address the issue. “In the classroom, I was not allowed to move, drink water, eat, go to the toilet, or talk,” said Chan, whose parents eventually removed her from the local school system and placed her in an international school — apparently one where she can eat and drink freely during class.

Call me old-fashioned but I thought one of the purposes of schooling is for children to acquire discipline.

The rhetoric is striking. If “going to school was like going to prison”, then there really is nothing to lose and nothing to fear. No wonder Joshua Wong Chi-fung transitioned between the two so smoothly.

Even more striking are the responses of our teachers. Cheung Siu-chung, a secondary-school history teacher and member of the Hong Kong Professional Teachers’ Union, said the rash of suicides “is the accumulative effect of the education system”. He gave that comment as if he is not part of the system. The truth is, not only is he a teacher, he also belongs to the city’s most powerful and influential teacher’s union, who have had representatives in the Legislative Council for years if not decades.

But even he is not responsible. No one ever takes responsibility.

As a dissident, Cheung is famous for his antiChinese mainland speeches on Facebook. He was seen publishing posts such as “is there anyone like me who wants the China national team to lose so badly?”

Many student activists call Cheung their mentor. If indeed many of our students are psychologically in distress, we have to look beyond the exams and syllabus — where we traditionally identify stress to come from. Our students can also be stressed if they cannot feel at ease with their national identity, or do not have faith in their motherland that is having an increasing influence over the development of the city.

Our city has many dissident teachers like Cheung. Imagine what they preach to their students. These teachers could well be the main reason why our students are anxious about the future.