It is good that Premier Yu Shyi-kun's new Cabinet line-up reflects a theme of humanism. After vowing to put greater emphasis on primary and secondary education, Yu has appointed Huang Jung-tsun (
First of all, a compulsory education builds character and creates opportunities for social mobility. It is crucial to the development of our nation. Educational reforms in recent years, however, have often not fulfilled these needs. For that reason, we now need to stop, look and consider to our past efforts in educational reform and then make a new start.
Consider the nation's nine-year compulsory educational program. Its goals were to integrate the curriculums of elementary and high schools and to reduce the excessive academic pressure on students. The new curriculums, however, impose, somewhat ironically, far heavier workloads than the old ones, making it necessary to increase classroom hours.
In addition, further evaluation is urgently required of the education ministry's devolution of decision-making powers to school administrators, abandoning its responsibilities as the nation's top government organ for education.
For the effective integration of teaching and course materials for the seven main subjects, the training of qualified teachers is a must. But the ministry has never taken the training of teachers seriously -- neither before nor after the program's official launch last September. The ministry has failed to undertake effective policy planning and decision-making for the training and selection of teachers for many new courses under the program, including courses taught in English and Chinese.
Although the ministry has trained many new teachers of English, it has not properly laid out qualification criteria for established teachers who wish to teach English-language courses. This has seriously undermined the ministry's efforts to improve the qualification of English teachers. In fact, some new teachers can barely find openings at schools, while those lucky enough to find openings must teach both English courses and courses unrelated to English. It goes without saying that these problems have a negative impact on teaching quality.
Another area of concern are problems with efforts to "nati-vize" education -- efforts that have been going on for decades. The focus on teaching students more about Taiwan is about to become a thing of the past. Worse yet, course materials for history and geography classes in junior high schools again relegate Tai-wan to a status subordinate to that of the historical giant that is China. This is certainly not good in terms of shaping students' identity and their understanding of their own country during the most crucial learning period in their lives -- not to mention its distortion of the purpose of education and its extremely negative implications for national security.
When it comes to higher education, the ministry touts the pursuit of excellence as its core policy. But it has neither properly distinguished the roles of public and private universities, nor appropriately allocated resources among these schools. As a result, the learning environment in our public universities deteriorates. Budgets for these schools are often insufficient to cover sala-ries, causing the teacher-student ratio to plummet from 1:4 to 1:25. Under such circumstances, raising overall educational standards is simply out of the question, as it is difficult enough to maintain current standards.
Finally, education is also an important channel for social mobility. The right to an education is considered a dominant social right. Due to the increasingly ambiguous form of differentiation between public and private universities in recent years, however, tuition fees for public universities have constantly risen, gradually narrowing the gap between fees for public and private universities.
This tuition policy places an unnecessary economic obstacle in the way of our lower and middle classes and militates against social mobility. Indeed, another problem is that education reform in Taiwan has tended to ignore children from economically and socially disadvantaged families.
The ministry of education, for example, frequently encourages the public to search for information they need on the Internet. It doesn't seem to realize that disadvantaged children are the group with the least access to the Internet. Furthermore, the ministry asks all parents to take an active part in their children's education. But, for a family struggling for its basic livelihood, this appeal is simply impractical.
The best solution to this problem is for the government to put more resources as quickly as possible into helping students with poor academic records or learning disabilities so that these students can receive the attention they deserve.
Of course, even though the nine-year compulsory educational program is flawed, it will be difficult to bring it to a halt now. It is to be hoped that the new education minister will review the nation's educational development and promptly address the above problems.
Chuang Wan-shou is chairman of the Taiwan Association of University Professors. Wu Shu-min is chairman of the Northern Taiwan Society.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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