The Cabinet approved a plan last week to provide tuition fee subsidies to public and private high school, vocational high school and junior college students from families with an annual household income of less than NT$900,000 — up from the NT$600,000 originally proposed by the Ministry of Education.
Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) and Minister of Education Wu Ching-chi (吳清基) both apologized to parents and members of the public who were upset over the higher threshold.
The uproar over the proposal, which is intended to equalize the costs of attending public and private schools, has subsided for the time being. However, the controversy has raised the question of how such a major educational policy could be proposed and then changed at the whim of the education minister alone?
On the surface, the incident appears to be a case of wishful thinking in which the minister mistakenly thought he could adjust tuition fees as he saw fit. However, it is symptomatic of the ministry’s habitual mode of decision-making.
A consultative report on education reform published in 1994 suggested Taiwan should set up a national education research institute. This body would do ongoing research on proposed education policies before they are implemented. Unfortunately, after education reform got under way, powerful members of the “education reform faction” put this proposition on the back burner. Proceeding according to romantic notions about “advanced Western” education, they treated students as laboratory mice, subjecting them to one reform after another.
Aside from throwing students and parents into a state of confusion, these reforms have wasted a lot of Taiwan’s education resources. As a result, the quality of Taiwan’s education looks a lot better than it really is.
Following the return to power of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), one would think the government would conduct a thorough review of these education reforms and their effects.
Regrettably, the proposed national education research institute remains to this day a provisional office. Taking a “positivist” scientific approach, those responsible for planning the institute think “education research” means using all kinds of tests to collect assessment data on elementary and high-school students. In respect to today’s most important education issues, they either ignore them or avoid talking about them, so as not to incur unwanted trouble.
When it encounters pressing education policy issues, the ministry sticks to its habit of handing the matter over to some friendly professors who then outsource it to someone else to collect “empirical data.” Data collected in this way lacks cohesion and does not always meet the ministry’s needs. Often it is of no use for resolving real problems.
Policy decisions made by ministry officials based on this way of doing things often seem arbitrary. Frequently they have to be changed over and over again. No wonder education mandarins are often criticized as “romantic.”
The only sound basis for government officials, whatever their department, to decide what policies to promote is rationality, not romanticism. Although the latest fracas over the plan to equalize high-school tuition fees has subsided for the time being, now that Wu Ching-chi is out of the line of fire, he should learn from this experience and give careful thought to how to make the education ministry’s policy decisions more rational.
Hwang Kwang-kuo is a professor of psychology at National Taiwan University.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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