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Following is the transcript of remarks by the Secretary for Education, Mr Eddie Ng Hak-kim, at a media session after officiating at a launch ceremony-cum-seminar for the Basic Law video teaching resource package today (April 29):
Reporter: Secretary, would you comment? You have said recently that a lot of criticisms in the printed press are misleading a lot of students into doing the wrong thing about political reform. Do you think there is a need for your department to help educate students ...
Secretary for Education: On the political reform or the constitutional development initiative, you can see that, and actually we should be paying respect to a lot of our students and teachers in the schools as well, because while our students might be seeing one part of the news and reports, they would also be looking at others as a multi-source of information and that is the liberal studies mindset, as I call it, to help students self-equip in order to deal with different types of confusing messages and drive their own sort of objective, sort of conclusion. And what we are trying to do is, first of all, schools, teachers as well as classes are actually not avoiding any of those controversies but they will be facing and rising up to it and have open discussions and a very objective and multi-dimensional understanding of the subject.
Reporter: (Inaudible.)
Secretary for Education: First of all, the three-man committee/working group has been working very hard and in the last several months they have been meeting different constituencies, including the education community, so it will not be a new thing to any of the school leaders and teachers. That is the first thing. Second, I believe this is another reason why we would like to have direct contact with the citizens in different corners, different segments of life as well, in order to make sure we also have a direct chance to interface, and this would be the key ones.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)
Ends/Wednesday, April 29, 2015
Issued at HKT 18:25
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