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The price of neglecting education

Opening a newspaper a few days ago, I saw a horribly shocking photograph of a pair of sneakers standing next to a puddle of blood. Yet another high school student had jumped off a building because of pressure at school and psychological distress. The parents were crying and the school president was kneeling down.

Every time such a tragedy occurs it is followed by meetings at the school where county and city education officials show their concern and urge the school to strengthen its day to day counseling services. These services include contacting and communicating with parents, paying attention to student behavior, telling students that school is not everything in life and improving social networking through organized activities and skill development.

The school of the student who committed suicide had already made an appointment for a counseling meeting later that week with the student's parents. Unfortunately, it was too late. These meetings are only effective with some students and their parents and cannot really remove heavy school pressures and psychological stress.

So what causes these suicides? It is simply the competition for acceptance into higher education.

There is a serious shortage of outstanding public high schools and universities. Some towns don't even have a decent public high school. This means that neither the multiple entrance system or a system with multiple texts and diversified knowledge are capable of resolving the pressure experienced by students to get in to a good high school or university. Instead, these approaches add to the pain and the burden.

Many academics and civic leaders often repeat that admission competition is a process necessary for social progress. Admitting students who are not suited to higher education to public senior high schools or universities is both a waste of public funds and an abuse of sorts of those students.

The right to education today is a fundamental civic right, and at the tender age of 14 or 15, students are graded and forced to participate in the cruel competition for admission to the right school: missing the cut by one or two points means vocational school.

This system deprives students of their right to choose their own educational path, and from a competitive perspective, it is also extremely unfair to students with few educational resources or students from economically disadvantaged families. This is a particular irony in a developed country like Taiwan, where GDP per capita has exceeded US$14,000 and which actively works to deepen democracy, human rights, fairness and justice, and claims to stress education.

Thirteen years ago, the 410 Education Reform Association proposed four major policies, and a seven-year, NT$350 billion special education budget. Prior to the presidential election, both major parties gladly promised to implement the budget, but after the elections, the buck was passed.

It is infuriating to see that rather than spending this money on education issues that would improve the educational level of everyone, they would rather spend it on the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant despite a lack of consensus for its construction, the high speed rail build-operate-transfer project which shouldn't require any public funds, and paying off hundreds of billions of Taiwan dollars in bad loans resulting from embezzlement in large corporations.

If the president and the Cabinet had implemented the budget suggested by the 410 Education Reform Association as promised, today's junior high school students would not have to fret over their senior high school entrance exams but would instead study in high quality combined high schools in their local communities.

In addition to basic civic studies, they would be able to choose philosophy, psychology and technical arts. Through observation, thought and discussion students could learn to understand their own disposition, interests, and potential as well as the rights and responsibilities of modern citizens.

After graduating from high school, they would be able to choose to study in outstanding public universities or schools for the technical arts, try to be accepted at national comprehensive or research-oriented universities or seek employment. Students would be happier at school and there would be less suicide.

A capitalist country that is only concerned with economic development and neglects the education of its people will surely have an unfair, undemocratic and environmentally unfriendly economy. Taiwan is a good example of this.

On this foundation, it is futile to talk about liberty, democracy, rule of law, human rights, environmental rights, social stability, ethnic conciliation and cultural innovation and hope to gain the respect of the international community.

The strange thing is that despite the importance of this issue, I still haven't heard any of the presidential or legislative candidates make any concrete policy suggestions on education.

Why do the presidential and legislative candidates of the major parties, who always talk about public welfare, keep quiet when they clearly see how the younger generation are suffering, with some of them even taking their own lives? This really makes me worry about Taiwan's democracy and wonder whether "justice" really will be the core value of the future of Taiwan.

Chang Tse-chou is the head of Banciao Community University.

Translated by Perry Svensson
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