Radicalization of young students must cease

Chow Pak-chin is appalled by a student urging her peers to be ‘unpresentable’ and wonders where such views originate

As parents many of you must be perpetually perplexed by the reality that, despite a more affordable quality of life in modernday Hong Kong, it is increasingly challenging to raise a child who respects law and order as much as social etiquette, not to mention the rights and freedoms of not just oneself but also of others.

What happened at the Queen Elizabeth School Old Students’ Association Tong Kwok Wah Secondary School last week would undoubtedly send chills down the spine of parents and educators alike. At the new academic year’s opening ceremony Tong Kam-ting — the chairperson of the school’s student union — greeted new and existing students, young people in the formative years of their lives, with what I’d call a rather hair-raising speech; she doggedly encouraged her fellow students “to learn to be an unpresentable person”.

It all began when, on last year’s Parents’ Day, Tong’s mother learnt from the class teacher that her daughter was “rather blunt” and that while such a personality has its advantages, it could also mean a bumpier ride in society ahead. Refusing to take her class teacher’s words as useful advice, Tong went on to elaborate — in her speech — how her bluntness and uncompromising tendency had yielded positive results. During her tenure as chairperson of the student union, for instance, there had been multiple occasions where Tong had clashes of opinion with the union’s two consultant teachers. Back-chatting elders was traditionally considered insolent behavior, Tong said but it’s precisely because of the unpresentable nature in her that she has managed to ensure mutual understanding. The chairperson also cited the incident where, at the opening ceremony of the school’s sports day, her committee stood with their backs to the national flag — an act of resistance and defiance.

In fact, according to Tong, there’s not a dearth of unpresentable young people in our society today, whose disagreeable spirit has enabled them to “protect their homeland by fighting for democracy and the independence of Hong Kong”. Lamentable, says Tong, is society’s marginalization and incrimination of these young people, its indifference to their revolutionary approach to social change, as a result making 24 such youths “political prisoners”.

So gung-ho and overzealous is Tong’s speech on the virtue of being unpresentable and uncompromising that it makes one wonder, just what and who gave our youths such dangerous thoughts? Someone in our society must have let our youths to feel it is okay to indulge in such antisocial thoughts and behavior, someone with adequate academic credentials to gain the trust of our students. Could it be the Hong Kong Professional Teachers’ Union, the biggest of its kind in the city, and one with an anti-establishment political stance? Among the union’s 90,000-strong membership is a teacher by the name of Cheung Siu-chung, who, not surprisingly, was dedicated “special thanks” by Tong in her speech for giving her encouragement and faith when in times of doubt. Incidentally, Cheung turns out to harbor deep anti-China sentiments, as evident from his socialmedia posts.

There are two things we need to set straight here. While perseverance is a virtue, we — as educators, parents and media practitioners — need also to instill in our youths the importance of compromises in a society where individual rights and freedoms and opinions matter, and that one’s refusal to compromise could come at the expense of other people’s rights and freedoms. It is equally important for us to guide our youths through moral boundaries, the respect of which is indispensable to social harmony. Our youths need to know that the student leaders who instigated disruption to society must be punished, and that they are by no definition “political prisoners” — their trial took place in an open court, their sentences given according to the damage to law and order in our society, providing no grounds to celebrate them as “martyrs”. We’re currently at a stage where, if our youths aren’t given rigorous guidance on telling right from wrong, their fervent pursuit of twisted political ideals could lead to radical and extreme thoughts and actions. The sensible thing to right the wrong in this case would be to impose punitive measures on those who encouraged Tong’s politically incorrect and logically deficient speech. But with Joshua Wong Chi-fung’s father openly calling his now-imprisoned son’s politically and socially disruptive behavior a “godsend”, it’s anybody’s guess what the school will do. Until then, I shall cross my fingers for our children.