Book Review

     In this book, Ting-Hong Wong presents a comprehensive review of policy actions taken over the 194565 period in the education sector (primary, secondary, vocational, tertiary, and teacher training) by the British Colonial administrations of Singapore and of Hong Kong and by local interest groups in each colony and throughout Southeast Asia, including the Malay Peninsula, mainland China, and Taiwan after 1949. This is thus a social history in the sense that the official educational institutions of Singapore and Hong Kong are not themselves the ultimate subject of analysis and documentation. Rather, Wong's main concern is to use the contested terrain of education in order to reveal the interest-group composition and dynamics of civil society in each case. Despite the fact that the time period covered by the study is relatively short in historical terms, readers interested in the origins of current educational institutions absolutely must read this book because it was in this brief period that so many patterns of governance were established. The 1945-65 years, even today, remain unmatched for their rapidity of demographic, political, and economic change, together with the challenges and opportunities they presented to the emergent societies of Singapore and Hong Kong.

     Wong does much more than review the previously published documents. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment in this massive project is in his patient assembly of the heretofore undocumented pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle. Wong has sifted through personal and official correspondence between leaders (as well as between those who sought but failed to become leaders). In his eight chapters, he has 1,098 footnotes to his main points, most referring to primary source materials, each of which must have taken great effort to uncover. Not only newspapers but also archival material has been painstakingly synthesized and presented for readers. It is to his credit as a stylist and skillful teacher that this documentation seldom reads as dry, undigested data; he weaves his narrative seamlessly from the documents used as evidence.

     Wong's other enduring contribution is to place the postwar politics of Singapore and Hong Kong in a comparative, contrasting perspective. This has been done less frequently than might be supposed. Wong's starting point is that, despite a common cultural and institutional heritage from British colonization, local political realities led to vastly different outcomes in these two cases, in part because of the different ethnic and racial compositions of each colony and the cultural meaning of ethnicity in each case. This starting point is in itself more sophisticated than some of the simplistic arguments that have been attempted in the past, with their reduction of cultural study to imperialism and colonial domination.

     In this regard, the only similar work in English with which I am familiar that even approaches the sophistication of Ting-Hong Wong is by E. Patricia Tsurumi (Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979]). Tsurumi's excellent book analyzes many of the political dilemmas in colonization and the social response to it that have now been treated by Wong: How can imperial governors create a common, yet denationalized, local identity and achieve legitimacy through a colonial education system? How can this be accomplished without at the same time losing control of the school system to local interests? Tsurumi makes only passing reference to colonization by the Dutch, Americans, and British, in addition to that of the Japanese in Korea, and does not develop the Taiwanese response to Japanese education explicitly as a comparative project.

     The comparative case study approach by Wong makes apparent that the monoracial demographic heritage of Hong Kong; its geopolitical niche in the British Empire as a bridge to China; and its competing interest groups from Christian, Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Kuo-Ming Tang (KMT), led to different curricular outcomes than in Singapore. In this regard, Wong contributes to the emergent consensus that, while colonists could remake the social world, they could not remake it exactly as they liked. There were contingencies and constraints that no one could have foreseen. In addition to uncovering important new documents and illuminating two contrasting outcomes of colonial education policy, Wong develops his own analytic framework. He refines the concept of the pedagogic device, from the late theorist Basil Bernstein, in order to characterize the education projects in Singapore and Hong Kong. Wong also discusses and modifies the theoretical generalizations of a number of other leading critical theorists, including his own mentor, Michael Apple.

     Some readers may wonder whether the theoretical apparatus of the book adds much essential value to Wong's already rich historical contribution. Perhaps Wong could have been a bit clearer than he was about the major differences between his own interpretation of the historical evidence and competing interpretations of that same historical evidence. But he does offer an alternative to another important and influential perspective. Max Weber observed that bureaucracies often expand faster than do the sets of problems they were originally supposed to solve. Neoinstitutionalists in educational sociologyJohn Meyer and his students are familiar to CER readerswould similarly place this expansion of legitimizing authority beyond the control of any single government: education has become a world institution with norms and regulations that extend beyond the boundaries of the formal organization. Thus, whether or not colonial government seeks added authority, citizens naturally press governments to provide more regulation of the learning experiences and the training in fields that formerly were not regulated. In this way, children of merchants seek to become M.B.A.'s, and the children of traditional Chinese doctors seek to become medical doctors with university diplomas.

     But this neoinstitutionalist interpretation fails to illuminate the competing bases of legitimacy in postcolonial Singapore and Hong Kong, and here is where Ting-Hong Wong makes a contribution toward understanding the ultimately monolithic, hegemonic result of school expansion. The Taiwanese schools in "Rennie's Mill" in Hong Kong, loyal to the nationalist curriculum, ignored completely the HK Chinese Certificate Exam for many years. So, too, did partisans of the CCP in left-wing schools. The legitimacy of the denationalized Chinese cultural curriculum, proposed by the British as a pedagogic device, was never consolidated until the Chinese University of Hong Kong was established at the end of the period Wong documents. Wong shows, in Singapore as well as in Hong Kong, how the expansion of education was not a natural outgrowth of bureaucracy but was, rather, the calculated product of competing interests.

DAVID POST
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and University of Pittsburgh