On the first day of classes, over 1,000 secondary students in Hong Kong took to the streets and joined the pro-democracy protests.
Despite the heavy rains, the teenagers gathered under canopies to voice out their support for democracy. The students wore surgical masks to hide their identity but they do not expect the police to interfere with their legal and relatively small demonstration.
"Hong Kong is still free, but if I don't stand up for my freedoms now I might regret it someday. Then it'd be too late," said 15-year-old Thomas Tsang.
Together with four other classmates, Pearl Wong attended half a day of classes before joining the protests. Wong said, "I can skip homework for today, but if I lose Hong Kong what's left for me? That's why it's important for me to come out to voice my support for democracy."
While universities are expected to resume classes on Monday, students are planning to boycott them for two weeks.
The campaign, which started since early June, was sparked by a proposed extradition bill, which protesters believe will undermine the independence of Hong Kong’s justice system. Since then, the movement has transformed into a bigger anti-government and pro-democracy campaign, which included a call the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration’s provision on full universal suffrage for people in the territory.
Students have been at the heart of various protest movements over the past decade in Hong Kong, including a hunger strike in 2012 against a proposed curriculum on “patriotic education,” which they claimed would be brainwashing, and China’s rejection of the demand for universal suffrage in 2014.
Education University of Hong Kong sociologist Stephen Chiu claims that citizenship building only started following the British handover. The Liberal Studies curriculum, introduc passionate about social problems ed into secondary education in 2009, is credited with the cultivation of the youth who are passionate about social problems.
