There have been signals in the last few weeks that educators are slowly beginning to assert professional influence after decades of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) domination and eight years of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) indifference.
KMT domination of schools and universities was exacted through the control of personnel and curriculum. This control was so carefully and thoroughly applied that it is no coincidence, even in this democratic era, that National Taiwan Normal University — the top training ground for teachers — continues to prominently display a statue of dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), a man who, while still in China, once suggested strafing protesting students with machine gun fire.
Elsewhere, Fu Jen Catholic University still considers it appropriate to blend its campus’ Christian values with mandatory classes presided over by its Office of Military Instruction.
An essential part of personnel control was preventing teachers from forming independent unions. To this very day the law singles out teachers, discriminating against them by demonizing basic labor advocacy.
With its poor understanding of the importance of organized labor in a democracy, the DPP did little to rectify this residue of an authoritarian era while in government — though admittedly any changes would have required KMT support in the legislature.
The government of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), however, is expressing a willingness to allow the formation of teacher unions, though in a surreal twist, the Cabinet has presented a bill that would prevent teachers from forming a union with colleagues at the same school — whatever that means.
The bureaucratic desire to dominate campuses runs deep, it would seem: After all these years, the government is still terrified that teachers will thumb their noses at the Ministry of Education and launch some kind of pedagogic revolution.
In a sense, the ministry has reason to be afraid. Unlike most Western countries, where teachers lean to the left, the school establishment in Taiwan has been firmly in the grip of a conservative and doctrinaire philosophy and a professional network that has resisted efforts over the years to separate itself from the past.
By and large, teachers who identify things that are ill-adapted or wrong with the system have been unable to reform their workplaces from within, while retribution still awaits those who take part in political activities outside school hours.
The situation is made more complex by the inevitable tendency of teachers to act as advocates for student welfare, which opens the door to increased teacher participation in curriculum reform in the event of union empowerment.
One thing is clear: There is nothing of value in ignoring growing teacher dissatisfaction with their hamstrung professional identity. Teachers are the custodians of the nation’s future and their voices deserve to be heard and clearly distinguished, if desired, from government overseers.
The KMT and its dwindling ideological underpinnings are losing influence and support in a sector that was one of its most important breeding and weeding grounds. But this should not be equated with the devolution of education in this country. On the contrary, increased diversity of opinion and a stronger voice for individual teachers may go some way to encouraging a shift from rote learning to critical thinking among students.
The time of teachers acting as ventriloquist’s dummies for a political party and its ideological fixations is over, and it is time that the government woke up to this fact.
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