September 4, 2012
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Thousands Rally Against Hong Kong Curriculum
Thousands Rally Against Hong Kong Curriculum
By JOYCE LAU
Published: September 3, 2012
Thousands of teachers, parents, students and activists demonstrated over the weekend against proposed Chinese national education in Hong Kong schools, just before the academic year was set to begin Monday.
According to The South China Morning Post , three teenagers were told to end a hunger strike for health reasons, though they were replaced by 10 other protesters. Critics of the curriculum have likened it to brainwashing.
Organizers, including Scholarism , a student advocacy group, said that there were 40,000 protesters. The police in the semiautonomous Chinese city reported a vastly different number of more than 8,000 protesters.
The protest against what is being called “patriotic education” followed a larger rally in late July.
— JOYCE LAU
Canada ‘make-up’ classes disrupted by protesters
Protests have disrupted “make-up” classes that were meant to replace coursework that was missed during mass student demonstrations that dragged on for months across Quebec earlier this year.
As mandated by Bill 78, a controversial Quebec law passed in May , post-secondary institutions have until the end of September to make up those classes.
On Aug. 27, the first day of extra-sessional classes, 19 student protesters were detained inside a Université de Montréal building when about 50 student activists refused to vacate the premises, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. The university said it would suspend the first week of make-up classes for six departments whose student associations favored protest actions, in a move that affected 1,300 of the university’s 40,000 students.
“Winter session needs to be over,” Mathieu Filion, a university spokesman, said in an e-mail about the semester that normally ends in May.
The Université de Québec à Montréal was also forced to suspend about 60 classes last Monday, the CBC and The Montreal Gazette newspaper reported.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/world/asia/04iht-educbriefweb.html
