Educational Dream in a Postindustrial Reality: Expansion and Restructuration of Secondary Schools in Hong Kong

The paper examines and accounts for the main features of the expansion and restructuring of secondary school system in Hong Kong, amid the social background and theoretical discussion of post-industrial societies. Institutionalization of mass education and the rapid expansion of secondary school education emerged roughly at the same time of the rapid industrialization in the 1970s. The rapid transition to service economy in the late 1980s, in addition to the limited expansion of elite education in the tertiary sector in the 1990s, probably caused the rapid denegation of vocational schools and private schools. On the one hand, public and subsidized grammar schools remain as dominant or are even strengthened as high prestigious which led to higher chance of securing a place in the limited but expanding tertiary education. On the other, elite class tends to send their children to international schools in H.K. first and then university overseas. The above arrangement seems to fit the global model of modern institution of education but is relatively unique, if we compare the case of H.K. to other post-industrial societies with similar developmental path like Japan, Taiwan and Singapore, in which the state encourages resources reallocation via the diversification of the types of schools to avoid inequality or class reproduction of poverty. Amid the background of the coming of the ideas of neo-liberal educational reform in the 2000s, this paper explains why Hong Kong mainstream society will follow the simple rule of tightened competition via the education system on the one hand, and how the privileged class tries to gain status advantages by either exit from the local game or by supporting the current reform of privatization of some former subsidized public secondary school system on the other.