Hong Kong Local Secondary School Students and Educational Policies Near the End of Colonial Hong Kong – The Case of the Torch Magazine

Abstract Histories of the implementation of educational policies have given a sense that mainly the government and sometimes educators made efforts in the process near the end of colonial Hong Kong. Voices from local secondary school students are largely missing. In this article, I try to renew our understanding of this period by raising two research questions: (1) What was civic education? (2) How did local secondary school students attempt to contribute to implementing civic education? I argue that local secondary school students, acting within their school, attempted to help implement civic education by arming other students with preparedness. They achieved this by utilising a student magazine, through which they introduced civic education and collaborated with teachers as well as their peers. This was possible owing to the expanding nature of civic education. To grasp the student voice and discuss the subject in depth, I concentrate on an article regarding civic education found in Ying Wa College’s student magazine, the Torch Magazine, a rare and unused source I discovered while visiting the College’s library. I adopt a transdisciplinary approach: By bringing the discipline of history into conversation with the discipline of education, I aim to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of students’ strategies. For instance, I use the idea of “teacher authority” to demonstrate that the editors set up an interview as they considered the teacher authoritative and tried to further accomplish their goals by granting teacher authority. By recovering the neglected student voice, research results show that students formulated their philosophy and tactics to prepare other students for an educational policy. Not only does this tell us there were other actions during the period of Hong Kong’s planned handover, but it also reminds us that we could all contribute to one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals – Quality Education. Keywords: Civic Education; Education Department; Quality Education; Student Magazine; Ying Wa College