ABSTRACT

The author's own scholarly background is in comparative higher education, and she had spent many years doing research on China's universities and supporting Chinese normal universities in developing their first doctoral programs in 1980s and 1990s. Reflecting on these questions gave her a sense of profound conflict between the core values of the university, as it has developed in the Western world, and the values of the normal school or college of education, which became integrated into the university in the twentieth century. The model of the university of education, as a university-level institution with education as its leading field, offered a clear answer to the question of how to upgrade the Hong Kong Institute of Education while still preserving and enhancing the rich traditions of the five historic colleges of education. The traditional professions of medicine, law, and theology dominated the early universities, together with the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the quadrivium of arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music.