The protest campaign against the adjustments to high-school curriculum guidelines has exposed the Ministry of Education’s weak understanding of the law and the media’s confusion over the relationship between curriculum guidelines and textbooks. Furthermore, the result of a lawsuit against the adjustments is being misinterpreted as a ruling that the adjustments are illegal.
The legislature did not respond to the protesters’ demand to convene an impromptu session to address the legality of the adjustments, but instead only opened negotiations between the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and opposition parties that demanded that the ministry establish a curriculum council to review the guidelines in accordance with Article 43 of the Senior Secondary Education Act (高級中等教育法).
At the same time, the legislature told schools that they have the freedom to select the textbooks they want to use this year. As a result, from the perspective of the law, the legality of the adjustments remains unquestioned and the procedure in which the adjustments were made remains unchallenged.
This result shows that the KMT and opposition parties are only attempting to secure their own political interests and that they have no interest in establishing a democratic system based on the rule of law.
Regardless of how this ends, protesters’ demands are bound to be ignored and the campaign itself is bound to be sold out by politicians, regardless of which party they belong to.
For several years, the KMT has been capitalizing on the legalization of the 12-year national education scheme and the amendment of the Senior Secondary Education Act to set the direction for the curriculum guidelines and textbooks. The opposition parties, which have been failing to keep the KMT in check, have contributed to the complexity of the curriculum controversy.
However, more puzzling is that the conclusion of the negotiation between the KMT and opposition parties is, legally speaking, in complete agreement with the ministry’s treatment of the curriculum guidelines as being a part of its administrative procedure. It approves of the fact that the administrative power can continue to have complete authority over the procedure through which those guidelines are created, while the legislature’s role is only to “advise” the ministry to review its actions and make adjustments to its administrative rules.
A relaunch of the curriculum council’s review process would surely bring in the very source of the problem: the curriculum council itself. After the review process is launched, there might be different outcomes.
Before the legislature demands a more stringent administrative procedure, such as a hearing, the curriculum council — whose appointments are predominantly controlled by the ministry — might just give a rerun of the outrageously simplified procedure. Even if the result of the review is sending the guidelines back to the National Academy for Educational Research for further readjustment, will that have any substantial significance, since it is predominantly the ministry that determines the appointments of the academy.
If such negotiations between the KMT and opposition parties, which fail to address the problems of committee appointments and procedural justice, really are to be able to meet the demand of the protesters and the opposition parties, then there should be no more brainwashing and policy should no longer be made behind closed doors.
Is this result satisfactory enough for those who commended the high-school students who occupied the ministry building? Or is it perhaps that all everyone is after is a way to find temporary political satisfaction, regardless of the outcome? If that really is the case, then what is the meaning of the sacrifice that the high-school students have made?
In the short run, interparty negotiation results such as these are likely to fail to effectively remedy the potential defects in the procedures process of the creation of the curriculum guidelines, as well as the content of the adjustments themselves.
In the long run, the view that the administration of the curriculum guidelines should be formalized into an administrative procedure is just an expression of the attitude that it should be made easier for the authorities to govern and that this includes finding a way to evade legislative oversight.
The conclusion of the cross-party negotiations means that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) agrees with the KMT’s fundamental legal premise, which implies that the DPP is inclined to emulate the authoritarian governance that the KMT has been practicing.
The question that anyone who is concerned with the democratic legitimacy of the curriculum guidelines adjustments should ask is this: If the DPP is returned to power, will this legal premise automatically bring about curriculum guidelines and a procedure for creating such guidelines that are free of any attempt at brainwashing and that meets the requirement for stringent and legitimate procedures for making such changes?
Is there a risk that the transparent procedures that the opposition parties have been calling for could end up being just another lie employed to fool the public?
The previous editions of textbooks that are based on the old curriculum guidelines are perfectly legal for schools to use as long as their licenses are still valid.
The demand that schools should be free to select the textbooks they want is only a demand that the education ministry announce that both the new and the old editions of the textbooks can be used simultaneously, but it does not deny the validity of the new curriculum guidelines.
Unless an unequivocal announcement is made that forbids the use of the new textbooks, any policy that claims to support the old textbooks or the coexistence of the old and the new books is merely a trick that the KMT and opposition parties are playing to mislead the public.
Since the new curriculum guidelines are valid, the old versions have lost their legal validity because they have been replaced. This raises the question of is it merely an act of paying lip service when the opposition parties ask the government to restate the validity of the 2012 curriculum guidelines.
Will the curriculum guidelines become legally valid by the government repeatedly saying that they are? Is this some kind of incomprehensible magic in a country governed by the rule of law, or an empty slogan contrived by those who are ruling the country?
Liu Ching-yi is a professor in the College of Social Sciences at National Taiwan University.
Translated by Ethan Zhan
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