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However, the recent spate of stories about March and first-year medical student 14-year-old Hoi-lam Ho reveal more about the society we live in than about the children themselves. Both children epitomize every Hong Kong parent's dream come true.
Behind the headlines is a worrying trend that is shaping Hong Kong's youth -- an obsession with grades. Chinese parents are notoriously good at making a fuss over the talents of precocious youngsters. And when a child doesn't measure up, the options for improvement are plenty in a society that measures success by the number of A's attained in exams. Free time for play should certainly not stand in the way.
This competitive, go-getter spirit has served Hong Kong well. But when this attitude is foisted upon children the pressure can be all too much. Akin to sporting the latest in designer accessories, parents enjoy showing off their children's certificates and academic prizes in what can seem like a quest of one-upmanship.
The business of learning can be a lucrative one in Hong Kong. Private tutoring is burgeoning, and a few tutors are even afforded celebrity status and a never-ending waiting list of young hopefuls. The interest generated by the most popular and marketable tutors speaks volumes about the value the society places upon academic achievement.
According to a study conducted by the University of Hong Kong, across the territory about 50 percent of 6 to 13-year-olds receive tutoring, with demand increasing in the final years of secondary school to 70 percent.
The pressure is, in part, due to a state education system which breeds competition for entry to schools that are classified into three levels. Hence, there is an annual scramble for acceptance into the Band One institutions, resulting in plenty of tearful parents and children. The system also presents numerous hurdles for entry to A-level and undergraduate programs. Only 14,500, or 18 percent, of school-leavers will secure a place at Hong Kong's nine degree-awarding universities.
Hong Kong's situation reflects poorly against all other developed economies, and is lower than even Mexico and Turkey, which offer university places to 29 percent and 26 percent of school-leavers respectively, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Hong Kong's figure rises to 66 percent, but only when sub-degrees, vocational training and overseas university courses are included.
While the system of schooling in the senior years is set to change by 2012 with a new-look secondary structure and a curriculum which de-emphasises examinations, the government must do more to address a tertiary sector which caters for so few. It severely hampers Hong Kong's goal of a broad knowledge-based economy.
Even children who, through accident of birth, gain access to elite private schools and overseas college education often face hours of tutoring after school.
Deputy Secretary for Education Chris Wardlaw told a forum of business leaders, "Too much pressure is a bad thing. There is, in my opinion, too much exam-related pressure in schools today."
Psychologist Daniel Goleman argues in his book "Emotional Intelligence" that the conventional focus on cognitive intelligence -- verbal, mathematical, spatial, and logical -- comes at the expense of nurturing emotional intelligence. Alongside other experts, Goleman concludes that without social savvy, success outside the classroom is less assured.
Boston-based professor of psychology Ellen Winner writes that success depends upon the child's own will to achieve. If mainly motivated by parents, there is more likelihood of a disjunction between a child's intellectual and emotional growth.
When asked about parenting, March's father Tony Boedihardjo told the media, "Just try to do your best to nurture them and give them space to develop." He added, "Don't put them under too much pressure."
That's easy for the father of a child prodigy to say, but to what extent can and will the parents of Hong Kong's future generations listen?
Parents and educators do a disservice to the future minds of Hong Kong when they measure success purely by the number of A's scored. Academic potential must be bolstered by emotional growth.
Mozart was paraded around the courts of Europe's aristocracy from the age of five by his father Leopold. Albert Einstein wrote his first study on relativity at 15. Tales of child geniuses continue to capture the human imagination. But Mozart, Einstein, Hoi-lam and March are anomalies. Theirs will always be an untenable benchmark.
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(Eileen Jong is a Hong Kong-based freelance writer. She is also teaches English to secondary students at an international school.)
