Cheng Kai-ming

The academic and leading reformer of education in Hong Kong tells Kate Whitehead about the importance of preparing students to face an unseeable future.

HEADING SOUTH I was born in 1944 in Kunming (Yunnan province), in the area unoccupied by Japanese. I got the “ming” in my name from Kunming. With victory in 1945, our family moved to Shanghai, my mother’s home city. My mother’s sister was married to a rich businessman and I think he helped arrange for us to fly to Shanghai in a United States aeroplane. My father’s bosses at the bank decided to start an importexport company and my dad’s job was to manage the Hong Kong branch. In March 1949, we took a boat from Shanghai to Hong Kong. We were in quite a good financial situation and after a brief stay at the Luk

Kwok Hotel moved into a large flat on Shelter Street, in Causeway Bay. The flat overlooked the harbour and there were lots of boats in front of us. At night we could hear music drifting up from the boats and occasionally a gong was sounded to alert people to water thieves.

The hillside behind us was covered in squatter huts. I was impressed by the newspaper boy who, while riding his bike, could toss rolled-up papers onto the balconies of the flats above. My brother, Gary Cheng Kai-nam, was born in Hong Kong. He’s six years younger than me. My parents gave him the name Kai-nam – nam means “south”, because we went south to Hong Kong.

SECOND PLACE During the Korean war, my father’s company went into debt and he lost his job. He was unemployed and it was a tough time for us. We moved four or five times, each time to a smaller flat, until we moved into a room shared with three other families. It meant I moved from school to school, from St Mary’s Church Kindergarten, in Causeway Bay, to a Confucian school in Tsim Sha Tsui to a Christian school in

North Point. I went to seven schools before I attended university. When I was five, I won a picture book for my part in the school play. I showed my dad and he said, “It’s a very nice book, but your classmate is the champion, he got the golden key.” It was a formative moment for me and I always strove to be top of the class.

BACK TO SCHOOL In 1961, I went to New Method College, one of the top private schools, for my A-levels, and then entered Hong Kong University to study mathematics and physics. I never became a scientist, but it was so useful to have mathematical and logicalthinking skills. University life was relatively peaceful, and I developed a lot of friendships. Although I was a timid student, I taught myself the Chinese flute and joined a few performances. I graduated in 1966 and stayed on for a year as an honours graduate, which was when the Hong Kong riots started. It was about this time I decided to teach and I was asked to return to my old school, Pui Kiu Middle School, to teach physics. Later, one of my father’s friends, a retired teacher from Wah Yan College and 11 of his retired friends decided to start a school. That was the start of my real career. While looking for a campus, we went to a shabby school in North Point to see what we could learn. It was there that I met my wife, she was the school’s accountant and handled all the logistics. We got married in 1973 and had two children, a daughter in 1977 and a son in 1981.

BRAVO, BRAVO After a year, we found premises for the school in a poor area in Shau Kei Wan and called it Elementi. The students were poor and weren’t expected to get good results in public examinations, so we made sure that every one of them had at least an opportunity to be applauded on stage during their five years there. Whether it was for singing, athletics or whatever, we made sure of that. It made me realise that every student can achieve, but not necessarily in the narrow academic way. I ran Elementi from 1970 for nine years. After I closed the school, I taught at St Paul’s College for three years and then went to HKU to do a certificate of education and then a master’s of education. In my final year of studies, in 1983, my physics teacher went on sabbatical and asked if I’d stand in for him.

DOCTOR CHENG When I finished my stint as a temporary lecturer, my wife suggested I further my studies. I went to London to do the required oneyear residence for a PhD at the London Institute of Education. It wasn’t easy to leave my family behind, but I couldn’t afford to take them with me. My thesis was on decision-making that crosses macro education planning and micro school planning. That changed my life. In London, I was interviewed by the HKU dean of education, Alan Brimer, who was there to do international recruitment, and was hired as a lecturer in education. I borrowed some money from my father to bring my family over and have a 13-day tour of Europe.

THE PAY-OFF Back in Hong Kong, I first taught school management, then moved into educational planning and then got research projects in China.

It was a time of the education reforms in China, decentralising the education system. The first project was in 1986 for Unesco and then I got a major project from Unicef. It was my first international project and I adopted my qualitative research methodology to study two counties in northeast China, one poor – in Liaoning – and one rich, Dalian. Studying the rural areas, I developed an understanding of the culture. In China, regardless of the wealth of the villagers, they all have fairly high aspirations for education, which I attribute to the old civil examinations. The whole society has a hope that as long as you work hard, regardless of your background and ability, you can succeed. That is the belief.

FUTURE PROOFING I was involved with Hong

Kong’s education reforms in 1999. We recognised that society had changed and that education had to change accordingly. My motto is that the ultimate aim of education is for the future of students, so you have to know what they are facing. Because of that, you can’t aim only at credentials. It used to be that credentials were a ticket to smooth sailing your whole life, but that is no longer the case. I realised organisations were getting smaller, the traditional pyramidal bureaucracy was disappearing and moving into one-stop shops, and also that mass production was no longer the fashion. Production is about creating desire; the whole model has changed. People are less loyal to their jobs because the organisations have no responsibility to the employee. At the time, all our documents started with the sentence “society has changed” – this was the alarm that therefore education has to change.

CAMPUS FAMILY I was warden of two HKU student halls – Old Halls and then Lee Hysan Hall – for 18 years from 1987 and my children grew up there and rode their bicycles around campus, it was a nice environment for them to grow up in. The wardenship taught me that student self-governance is so important. In 1996, I was invited to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for a year and I continued to go back to teach every spring term for nine years. There is a different campus culture in the United States and special respect is paid to students, they can even teach, whereas in Hong Kong there’s more of a power distance between lecturers and students. Over the past 15 years I’ve become interested in the emerging science of learning underpinned by neuroscience, I’m interested in the process of learning.

NEW NORMAL With the social unrest in Hong Kong and then the pandemic, the whole world is facing a new normal, something we can’t predict. Nothing I’ve learned in the past can enable me to face the future. You can’t complain about things being different because they will be different. But if you think of the future, things are just emerging. There are all kinds of opportunities that can create new windows, no one can stop you. I don’t think anyone after 80 can be active in his or her career, so my years are numbered, and I’ve been thinking about what I want to focus on. I’d like to consolidate what I’ve been thinking and teaching into something tangible, perhaps a series of seminars, webinars, or maybe even TikToks.