PolyU hosted a forum for school principals from Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Chinese mainland recently. At the forum, Dr Luke Fung Yat-chung, Lecturer of PolyU's Department of Applied Social Sciences, also author of Eating up the society: from the kitchen to the bigger world, delivered a keynote speech entitled "Teaching and Learning of Social Responsibility—the vision of a sociologist ". In this issue, we are pleased to have invited Dr Fung to share his views with us.

1/ How would you perceive social responsibility?

First of all, let’s talk about what a society is. In Latin, “socio” means friend, and people around us, and so sociology refers to the knowledge that studies people around us. And where is the society? Former British Prime Minister Ms Margaret Thatcher once said, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women.”

In fact, society is among us, inside and outside. However there are some sayings like we sacrifice ourselves for the society, or we ignore the welfare of the society for the good of ourselves, putting “society” and “ourselves” in an opposite position. This may not be ideal, in fact, individual and society, individual and group is not mutually exclusive.

2/ How can we “teach” social responsibility?

To develop students’ sense of social responsibility, apart from letting them know how they could integrate their personal wish with the society’s requirement, it is more important for them to understand the concept that "you are the society, and everything you do will affect the society”.

We can look at the example of the Clean Hong Kong Campaign. The Campaign has made use of different promotional videos to educate the public to fulfill their social responsibility in making Hong Kong clean. But reviewing the several videos taken in the 70s, 80s up till 2010, the term “social responsibility” was never mentioned in the videos. Instead they all conveyed the message: “Clean Hong Kong, it should be inherent as part of your life”. This is a very successful civic education campaign in Hong Kong. One of the more obvious results is that people in general do not spit now. But this little result is achieved after spending numerous efforts over the decades in this city with millions of people. It seems that it is not cost effective. But if it can let people understand that personal life and social life are inter-related, it will help build social cohesion in the long run.

3/ How can we “learn” social responsibility?

Let me share my experience. I was responsible to teach a subject “Knowing the Hong Kong society and social service” for non-local undergraduates during their foundation year of study. Together with other teachers, I led over a hundred students to participate in voluntary service during weekends. At first some students were reluctant to do so, as they thought it was not directly related to the development of their profession. However, one of the students who aspired to be an engineer later told me that, he found it meaningful in doing voluntary work, and through which he could have the opportunity to get in touch with the underprivileged groups. Furthermore, he would think about how he could make use of his knowledge in engineering to help these people.

In my opinion, to help students understand the meaning of social responsibility, teachers can participate in voluntary service together with students, and they do not have to talk too much about the doctrines.

4/ As a sociologist, what is your vision?

I hope that one day

i / teachers and students can see the phenomena of the society out of their concern for the community, and

ii / we do not have to teach and learn social responsibility—because our care for and commitment to the society have already become part of our lives.