Recent reports in the media said that some city and county governments intended to appropriate education budgets to purchase textbooks for elementary school students or provide free after-school programs. These plans have caused much debate.
Parts of municipal and county education budgets have long been used for non-educational purposes and this has led to criticism that implementation rates for education budgets are too low. Local governments’ plan to use these budgets for after-school programs means they would be spending the money in an appropriate manner.
What deserves our attention, however, is that different after-school programs may yield widely opposite results. Education authorities should therefore act with caution. For example, if the programs are merely used to prepare students for entrance exams, the benefits may be limited to certain students, while also encouraging public schools to organize similar programs.
However, if schools can design curriculums based on the individual needs of students, academic performance could increase and students would have more opportunities to explore different topics. Such programs could also offer a clean break from passive childcare.
After-school programs can offer remedial instruction to poorly performing students. In light of the wide performance gap among Taiwanese students, remedial instruction is necessary. Results of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006 organized by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development showed that the mathematics competency of 15-year-old Taiwanese was excellent. But the standard deviation of their average scores was the highest among the top 10 countries. Finland’s youngsters also ranked at the top, but standard deviation there was the lowest.
The results of the Basic Competence Test for Junior High School Students also show a similar tendency. More poorly performing students might have encountered difficulties already in elementary school, but they are unable to receive appropriate counseling and assistance because of fixed curriculums and limited manpower. As a result, their learning constantly declines and the gap widens.
Remedial instruction is most important and effective in primary education and will be more difficult to achieve if only picked up in junior or senior high school.
Average and successful students could also use the programs to explore their aptitudes and develop new fields of interest. Promotionism, a phenomenon all too frequent in Taiwan’s high-pressure school environment, involves students seeking advancement to higher levels of education without regard to personal interests or quality of learning, which causes most students to only care about school work and devote most of their time studying for tests. They therefore seldom have a chance to explore other subjects.
The phenomenon is more obvious when junior high school graduates enter either senior or vocational high schools, as they will be studying in different departments or fields. Are they aware of their own interests? Is it better for them to go to a senior or a vocational high school? In what fields can they make best use of their talent?
Without exploration and consideration beforehand, they will be at a loss about what to do and teachers will hardly be able to advise them. Students are often likely to consider these things only in the last few weeks before making their choices and pressure may cause them to make rash decisions. This lack of understanding of their own aptitude and the resulting passive choice of future direction will in turn affect their career development.
If after-school programs can offer more courses and decouple them from tests, instill an understanding of and participation in the workplace and social concern and services, they will give students more opportunities to understand their abilities and needs and possibilities for social interaction. Such programs would also assist students in making decisions for their lives.
Finally, they can serve as an ability index when education authorities adjust enrollment programs.
It would be even better if programs planned for the long term, such as reducing teachers’ teaching hours to give them sufficient time to plan and implement more suitable after-school programs, or bring additional teaching resources to schools.
This would create greater all-round benefits, compared with the outcome of specific education measures of certain local governments.
Sung Yao-ting is a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling at National Taiwan Normal University.
TRANSLATED BY EDDY CHANG
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs