The Educational Fundamental Act (教育基本法) is the legislation governing the creation and execution of the nation’s education policy. All legislation, by its very nature, should enshrine the constitutional objectives of law: To protect the public and to keep the government in check.
All democratic countries operating a system of constitutional government must respect the rule of law, in which nothing is above the law. National leaders should never, in the exercise of their powers, break the law for their personal interest, and the fundamental law of such a country cannot be changed except through a legal, democratic process.
The whole fiasco of the non-transparent adjustments to high-school curriculum guidelines has been a scandal. The Ministry of Education had the gall to bring together, behind closed doors, a committee to make changes to the national curriculum guidelines. Minister of Education Wu Se-hwa (吳思華) must have been aware that any curriculum that did not represent the viewpoint of the recipient of the education would be breaching the act.
This is because the stipulations within the act are very clear. Article 2 of the act states that “people are the subject of education rights.” It also says that those implementing the provision of education are there to assist the recipient in their self-realization, specifically: “The state, educational institutions, teachers and parents alike shall share responsibilities to facilitate in the realization of the aforesaid education purposes.”
Could that be any clearer? In the task of educating children, not only parents, but the state, educational institutions and teachers are also facilitators sharing the responsibility of education. President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Wu are of course also included among these facilitators.
This means that irrespective of differing views of history or ideological beliefs, the act clearly states that children should be provided with an education from the viewpoint of the window through which they have seen the world from the time of their birth, and that you cannot, in order to achieve a specific objective, enforce a different reality on these children. That is, you cannot ask them to learn only about people, places, events and things that bear little relation to the world they have become familiar with.
This is also why Article 2 of the act lists “patriotic education” and “caring for the native soil” as the purposes of education. Things are becoming increasingly apparent. The fervent unification advocates behind the idea of “one China, same interpretation” and the non-transparent adjustments to the curriculum guidelines are peas in a pod, hoping to neuter children’s identification with the land in which they were born and to graft patriotic feelings onto China in order to reinforce identification with the unified idea of a “Greater China.”
This, they say, is all completely constitutional. Rubbish. In Constitutional Interpretation 328, the Council of Grand Justices refused to interpret the question: “What are the boundaries of the national territory of the Republic of China [ROC]?” Without an interpretation of the national territory of the ROC, the idea of a “Greater China” is left adrift. More so, nowhere in the ROC Constitution or its Additional Articles does it mention the “Taiwan area,” and if they want to change the term “free area of the ROC” (中華民國自由地區) to “Taiwan area,” they must first remove the qualifier “prior to national unification” in the preamble to the Additional Articles.
In other words: Enough is enough. Do not take controversial issues and codify them in law. It is time for Wu to resign. He has broken the law and is causing chaos.
Christian Fan Jiang is a media commentator.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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