Noting the imminent transition here from a three- to four-year university program, Lewis said Hong Kong - and its educators - had an "opportunity for revolutionary change."

Education is a process whose effects accrue over decades. In my case, resettling in Asia was not even remotely on the cards when I was choosing my courses.

Yet there was something about the resulting course of study, however focused it might have been on applied mathematics and linguistics, which prepared me for a career that now, some 2.6 decades later, sits at the intersection of business and literature, neither of which I studied in any detail.

What will the Hong Kong of 2026 or 2036 look like? And what role will it play in China and the wider world?

Crystal balls are notoriously unreliable, but one can predict with some confidence that it will be considerably and perhaps completely different than the Hong Kong of 2006, the most recent year for which we have anything like reasonable data.

Individuals may approach the question asked at the beginning of the article differently than societies. Any given Hong Kong teenager may decide that a university overseas or on the mainland will provide the most appropriate combination of rigor, breadth and career opportunity.

However, especially preparing for a time, not too far off, when the majority of new entrants to the workforce have some degree of tertiary education, Hong Kong cannot rely on overseas institutions to prepare our future citizens, if for no other reason that many of them - and often the best ones - will not return.

The current attention being paid to educational "progress," a word less laden than "reform," is therefore both necessary and welcome.

Lewis suggested that Hong Kong defines the purpose of education in a way "more idealistic and less instrumental." Practical requirements - perhaps that graduates in accounting can multiply and that all graduates should be at least bilingual, for example - are what an engineer might call necessary but not sufficient conditions for a good education: graduates also need to be able to adapt to change; employers now want employees who can solve problems, not merely complete the tasks set in front of them.

But as a society, we also need voters able to evaluate the arguments on both sides of the pollution and tax debates, who have the skills to determine their own answers to the question of how much heritage conservation Hong Kong needs and can afford, whether our financial markets have the appropriate amount of regulation, and who can, in a phrase from a discarded part of a Harvard curriculum proposal, distinguish between "reason and faith."

However valuable such "General Education" - for such it is often called - may be, however, it cannot come at the expense of basic skills: while it may be beneficial, all things considered, that my doctor read Dostoevsky, I prefer his medical expertise to be up to date rather than classical.

Uniformity, however, is not - or at least should not be - the goal. One can perhaps forge general agreement that all graduates regardless of specialization should have a basic understanding of the scientific method and empirical reasoning, that society is a product of culture and the arts as much as engineering and even that we need a society whose individuals have some ability to distinguish truth from fiction and right from wrong.

Yet different institutions have different students and may, indeed, have different views on how best to achieve even the most straightforward of the agreed results. University classrooms may or may not be the best places to teach common sense or impart an ability to engage in ethical reasoning, but the university, or at least the university of the future, does not stop at the classroom door.

Universities, as Lewis said on several occasions, are part of the societies that nurture them, and usually receive explicit benefits in the form of grants or tax concessions.

Society has a right to expect that universities will turn out not just qualified and productive graduates but also good citizens. This is not a process of indoctrination but something entirely the opposite: a commitment to the truth, an ability to think about and then discuss issues with care, a willingness to treat other points of view with respect.

It is hard to think of a job more important than this one. Let us hope Hong Kong grabs this nettle with both hands.