I once heard that "schooling is evil". Is it true? Well there're always grey areas, but today it seems to me schooling is not all positive.

Well schooling, to me, it's always a process of transforming yourself into a better person. Through schooling, you polish your manners, learn to interact with people, you know more about the world around you and is then able to give meaningful feedback and reaction to the surroundings. It's also to make you a presentable person whom your juniors can look up to.

Well that may not always be the case.

Today after school, I went home by bus.

I almost fell asleep on the way, but some voices woke me up. There were two girls and one guy sitting near me, I glanced at one of the girls and she looks like a F.2 student, has a rather sweet appearance whom you'll think that she's a well-behaved innocent little girl. But that was only an illusion. Just when they sat down, they started to talk, almost solely in foul language. Another girl and the guy were lovers (I infer from their conversation). My Goodness. Through out their conversation, they used every dirty word available...the girls started to boast about their romantic experiences, like how many guys have pursued them, how long did the previous relationship last, and one of them kept on saying that loads of people think that she's pretty and she has even attracted a TB.

The most terrible thing in the conversation is that the girl said she's been beaten up, and then the guy said that all his classmates will back her up next time. Then the girl went on saying she was not scared at all and she even thought that it didn't hurt at all. I turned my head away from them all the way through their conversation and I felt so uncomfortable that a surge of coldness seemed to have rushed through my spine. Well the content of their conversation was one factor, but the scariest was the fact that they could boast about such thing so loudly that almost all the people on the bus could hear what they were saying. The two girls were wearing school uniform. I could see almost everyone on the bus watched them with comtempt.

Somehow I wonder if these people have really receive proper schooling. Yea, there's such a meanigless system in Hong Kong called "banding" and the gap between band 1 and 5 schools is really wide. But you can still call the Band 5 schooling "proper schooling", right? Teachers are trained and as a matter of fact, some of them are even more zealous about education than those in the band 1 schools are.

Somehow these people give me a feeling that they see no future in their lives. They lack a focus, a vision of how life would be once they left school. They let themselves fall, they give themselves up.

But what is the root of such problem? Why do these people see no purpose in life? Could it be the school? Could it be the parents? Could it be the whole education system? Could it be just the personality of these people? Could it be the media?

Problem is, there's 9 years' compulsory free education in Hong Kong. If schooling and education is meant to polish a person, then what had gone wrong, that we see so many teenagers giving up their futures and find refuge in blindly following trend and pop stars? Why is the number of these people keep on rising that they can almost fill the whole of Hong Kong Island up?

And as a matter of fact, we can also find these kind of people in Band 1 schools. So here we go again, the problem of the banding system.

I always believe that a person could not be bad right from the start. It's not genetically programmed that he should be bad and she should be good and you should be kind-hearted and I must be arrogant. It's all about the culture, the education and socialization. Seeing all these people around, should we be looking at where the root of the problem lies rather than changing the curriculum of schools? Somehow  the culture of Hong Kong does count. Various polls show that pop stars are the most influential people to the teenagers, but look, even the pop stars themselves are people who are as young as their fans, people who take drugs, speak foul language, pay people to cheer for them to create an illusion of having a lot of fans, and worst of all, they have no talent at all. Teeangers have no good role models to look up to. Look at the politicians who criticize voters and speak nonsense without taking actions. Government spending money on destroying cultural heritage and making an Ad with the national song of China to brainwash people, so that "people will love thier country".

What do we learn from such environment? Stupidity I'll say.

That is bad education.