The outdated factory system
Annie Chen’s letter “Exam system fails students” (Letters, Dec. 27, page 8) raised some fantastic points. I believe that in order to fully understand the structure of Taiwan’s educational system, we have to look a little more at its history.
The educational system that exists in Taiwan is based on the idea of preparing people for society. A large part of that society is based on the types of jobs that predominate. Taiwan still has a strong factory-based economy. A large part of the economy and workforce here is in factory jobs. If we’re going to look at the problems of education, we have to start by looking there. Schools are designed as factories because they prepare students for factory work.
Schools operate on set time schedules, often signaled by a bell. They treat classroom subjects as separate from each other. They group students together arbitrarily (age being the main qualifier; not ability). They seek to standardize the finished product. They try to get students to work alone, even though collaboration brings about better learning. When this system of education started to become popular, it was described in terms of a factory model that saw the students as a final product that needed certain skills to work in factories. Many books actually label this the factory model of education.
There is a valuable idea educators use called Bloom’s Taxonomy. It can be thought of as a way of understanding how we process information. At the very low level, it simply involves remembering and recalling information. What I see, in almost every school I have taught English in, is that this is as far as most of my students are able to go. They might read a story about slavery and be able to tell me what color shirt the man was wearing or what his job was, but not link it to any relevant information to bring about a discussion. Many of the English storybooks used in cram school classes are often so dull and unengaging that students only write stories looking to practice this level.
What scares me about this style of education is simple: I do not believe it can prepare most students for Taiwan’s future. The businesses that are growing now grew out of a creative passion for new ideas: Google, Amazon.com, Microsoft and Apple are just a few examples. The people who are successful in today’s world are those that think creatively and develop new ideas. People I talk to who are happiest in their jobs are happy because they have a certain amount of responsibility and creativity to come up with new and better ways of doing things. Tomorrow’s leaders are certainly not the ones who can pass a meaningless standardized test and nothing else. Unless we face this fact, we will continue to harm our students.
MATT BRONSIL
Changhua City
What does the KMT claim?
Recently there has been a lot of debate on the existence or non-existence of the so-called “1992 consensus.” This states that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) agreed that there is “one China,” but that they held different interpretations of its meaning. While it is quite obvious what the CCP’s interpretation of “one China” is, I can find no clear interpretation from the KMT. Is its interpretation “one China, one Taiwan”? Does its “one China” include Taiwan, Tibet and the various other islands that the CCP currently claims? Without clarification of what the KMT’s interpretation is, the argument of the existence or non-existence of the consensus seems meaningless.
BILL MCGREGOR
Fengyuan
Father’s Day, as celebrated around the world, has its roots in the early 20th century US. In 1910, the state of Washington marked the world’s first official Father’s Day. Later, in 1972, then-US president Richard Nixon signed a proclamation establishing the third Sunday of June as a national holiday honoring fathers. Many countries have since followed suit, adopting the same date. In Taiwan, the celebration takes a different form — both in timing and meaning. Taiwan’s Father’s Day falls on Aug. 8, a date chosen not for historical events, but for the beauty of language. In Mandarin, “eight eight” is pronounced
In a recent essay, “How Taiwan Lost Trump,” a former adviser to US President Donald Trump, Christian Whiton, accuses Taiwan of diplomatic incompetence — claiming Taipei failed to reach out to Trump, botched trade negotiations and mishandled its defense posture. Whiton’s narrative overlooks a fundamental truth: Taiwan was never in a position to “win” Trump’s favor in the first place. The playing field was asymmetrical from the outset, dominated by a transactional US president on one side and the looming threat of Chinese coercion on the other. From the outset of his second term, which began in January, Trump reaffirmed his
US President Donald Trump’s alleged request that Taiwanese President William Lai (賴清德) not stop in New York while traveling to three of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, after his administration also rescheduled a visit to Washington by the minister of national defense, sets an unwise precedent and risks locking the US into a trajectory of either direct conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or capitulation to it over Taiwan. Taiwanese authorities have said that no plans to request a stopover in the US had been submitted to Washington, but Trump shared a direct call with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平)
It is difficult to think of an issue that has monopolized political commentary as intensely as the recall movement and the autopsy of the July 26 failures. These commentaries have come from diverse sources within Taiwan and abroad, from local Taiwanese members of the public and academics, foreign academics resident in Taiwan, and overseas Taiwanese working in US universities. There is a lack of consensus that Taiwan’s democracy is either dying in ashes or has become a phoenix rising from the ashes, nurtured into existence by civic groups and rational voters. There are narratives of extreme polarization and an alarming
RSS