On Feb. 8, the Ministry of Education set the tone for the future of education in Taiwan by saying that next year, the Four Books, or four Confucian classics, will become a compulsory subject in the Chinese curriculum for senior high school students.
As of next year, senior high school students will have to take one class per semester on the Four Books during their three years at senior high. This will make students spend more time on the study of classical Chinese.
The question is are the Four Books so important that students should study them for six consecutive semesters?
Vice Minister of Education Chen Yi-hsing (陳益興) said that this policy change is necessary because recently “social problems such as school bullying, gangs and drugs have become very worrying problems.”
These comments show that the vice minister believes such behavior to be the result of not reading the Four Books or having a poor understanding of Chinese culture.
Small wonder students are incapable of improving when President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has education officials such as Chen in his government.
I think the officials should go back to university and take courses in basic logic before they make any further statements. They need to differentiate between “sufficient conditions” and “necessary conditions” before they say anything else.
In my opinion, classes in logic are inestimably more important than a curriculum including the Four Books.
The Four Books have been used as textbooks for Chinese officials since the Southern Song Dynasty (960 to 1279). They are considered classics in Chinese culture and as a result, the promotion of that culture inevitably also involves reading the Four Books.
However, if the Four Books were really all that beneficial, why is it that in the 700-year period from the Southern Song Dynasty up until the May Fourth Movement (1919), China was unable to develop values like freedom, democracy, justice and the rule of law, values that modern societies consider to be universal?
To be blunt, many of the teachings in the Four Books are meaningless to people living in the modern world and some of the teachings are even negative.
As such, listing the Four Books as an elective subject, rather than making them compulsory, would make more sense.
Amidst the global development toward democracy, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has discovered that the greater China-thinking embedded in Confucianism, which is often little but nationalism in disguise, is beneficial to the consolidation of their regime.
As a result, the Chinese government has started to establish Confucius Institutes all over the world. This kills two birds with one stone by first increasing the power of Confucianism, while encouraging and promoting its study within China.
Beijing is doing this in an attempt to merge Confucianism with Communism because both ideologies are essentially concerned with despotism and absolute power.
Apart from actively pursuing economic and political integration with China, the Ma administration’s policy of “eventual unification” also needs to mimic Beijing’s cultural policies, thereby making Taiwan and China as similar as possible in preparation for unification.
After all, “Mr. Ma” is just the “chief executive” of the “Taiwan Region.”
Chang Bing-yang is a professor at the National Taipei University of Education.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
Minister of Labor Hung Sun-han (洪申翰) on April 9 said that the first group of Indian workers could arrive as early as this year as part of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the Taipei Economic and Cultural Center in India and the India Taipei Association. Signed in February 2024, the MOU stipulates that Taipei would decide the number of migrant workers and which industries would employ them, while New Delhi would manage recruitment and training. Employment would be governed by the laws of both countries. Months after its signing, the two sides agreed that 1,000 migrant workers from India would
In recent weeks, Taiwan has witnessed a surge of public anxiety over the possible introduction of Indian migrant workers. What began as a policy signal from the Ministry of Labor quickly escalated into a broader controversy. Petitions gathered thousands of signatures within days, political figures issued strong warnings, and social media became saturated with concerns about public safety and social stability. At first glance, this appears to be a straightforward policy question: Should Taiwan introduce Indian migrant workers or not? However, this framing is misleading. The current debate is not fundamentally about India. It is about Taiwan’s labor system, its
On March 31, the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs released declassified diplomatic records from 1995 that drew wide domestic media attention. One revelation stood out: North Korea had once raised the possibility of diplomatic relations with Taiwan. In a meeting with visiting Chinese officials in May 1995, as then-Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) prepared for a visit to South Korea, North Korean officials objected to Beijing’s growing ties with Seoul and raised Taiwan directly. According to the newly released records, North Korean officials asked why Pyongyang should refrain from developing relations with Taiwan while China and South Korea were expanding high-level
Japan’s imminent easing of arms export rules has sparked strong interest from Warsaw to Manila, Reuters reporting found, as US President Donald Trump wavers on security commitments to allies, and the wars in Iran and Ukraine strain US weapons supplies. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s ruling party approved the changes this week as she tries to invigorate the pacifist country’s military industrial base. Her government would formally adopt the new rules as soon as this month, three Japanese government officials told Reuters. Despite largely isolating itself from global arms markets since World War II, Japan spends enough on its own
RSS