Minister of Education Tu Cheng-sheng (杜正勝) had his first legislative interpellation recently. For no other reason than that in a recent lecture at the Academia Sinica he displayed a map in which Taiwan, and the countries around it, had been rotated 90 degrees, People First Party Legislators Diane Lee (李慶安) and her elder brother Lee Ching-hua (李慶華), accused him of involvement in a conspiracy of "de-Sinification." This joke has already received considerable comment. I only wish to comment on it from another angle.
I have heard that "that woman" [which is how Tu angrily referred to Lee during questioning] is an expert on educational matters. If this is true, then she clearly has serious problems in her area of expertise.
One of the most important goals of education is to teach people how to look at things from different perspectives. Not only is this fundamental to the acquisition of knowledge, it is also basic to the ethical culture of a multicultural democracy. Isn't there a line from a Chinese poem that says: "face on, you see the mountain range; side on, you see the mountain peak"? If you are only allowed to look at something face on, you will only ever see the range. Only by looking side on will you see the peak. The ancients already understood this. In the computer age, the designers of computer models constantly change their variables, putting their images through 360 degree rotations.
That maps can only have a single north to south orientation, and that "students will not be able to read" a map that has been rotated by 90 degrees, are things that can only happen in a country full of people such as "that woman." Fortunately, Taiwan's schoolchildren are not so badly off.
I have a friend whose daughter enjoys building models of dinosaurs on her computer. Her methods are quite scientific. A three-dimensional dinosaur is vastly more complicated than a two-dimensional map, and she and her playmates, who are all adept at performing intellectual somersaults, should have little problem dealing with a map that has been rotated 90 degrees.
The attitude represented by "that woman" is not only horrific from the perspective of education for knowledge, but also from that of democracy. Why is taxpayers' money used to support the Academia Sinica? Isn't it in order to create and accumulate knowledge? If it was necessary to exercise this same kind of pusillanimity in the intellectual forums of the Academia Sinica to avoid being asked to "face questioning lying down," [in the manner of the offending map] what would be the result of that? Doesn't this smack of the "re-strictions on freedom of speech and action" that "that woman" is so often heard talking about?
It's strange -- or perhaps not so strange -- that these restrictions on freedom have not been mentioned in relation to this present situation. Even she seems to have forgotten about them.
In modern society, people wear many different hats to play different roles. "When you do something, act the part" embod-ies an important principle, namely that we show respect to different professional and moral standards. If Tu, in his dealings as an academian of the Academia Sinica, dare not act like the professional historian he is, or indeed obediently "faces questioning lying down," then how can we expect him to perform his duties as a minister of education?
To demand such standards of civilized behavior from legislators who are used to overstepping the line might be too much to ask. But from a legislator who professes a serious interest in education, one might have expected better.
Peter Ng is a national policy advisor to the president and a consultant at the Taiwan Association for Human Rights.
Translated by Ian Bartholomew
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