Recent news reports on the effectiveness of Taiwan’s education system indicated two contradicting trends. On the one hand, students from Taiwan outshone their peers on the international stage, winning prestigious competitions and awards.
Affirming the nation’s outstanding cultivation of human resources, the just-released global educational ranking by the Organisation for Economic Development and Co-operation (OECD) places Taiwan fourth, along with Japan, among the top five countries (the others being Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea).
On the other hand, two surveys by English Testing Services (ETS) on the English ability of workers in Taiwan suggest a serious gap between employers’ expectations and what the workforce has to offer. For instance, in 2012, 95 percent of the top 1,000 Taiwanese companies considered the ability to speak English an important job requirement, but only 2.4 percent of those surveyed were satisfied with their employees’ English-language skills.
Another ETS survey, conducted this year, indicated a similar dismal trend — only 18.1 percent of corporations surveyed said they were satisfied with the level of English-language knowledge of their workers.
According to the survey, Taiwanese employers are seeking workers with knowledge of international affairs (93 percent) and high English-language ability (68.4 percent) — expectations that recent graduates have largely failed to meet, indicating “a clear divide between expectations and efforts to maintain an international competitive edge by local companies.”
As much of the public discourse centers on the pitfalls of English-language education, less attention has been paid to the deep-seated cultural issues within the educational system itself. For years, despite the well-intended policies of educational reforms, the education system in Taiwan has overemphasized the academic achievements of students at the expense of arts, music, physical fitness, creativity, self-discovery and critical thinking.
One prevailing phenomenon under such a system is that all academic endeavors are geared toward garnering external awards and credentials by passing tests and winning competitions, while neglecting the intrinsic and self-motivated process of learning. Consequently, this unbalanced view of education has facilitated the formation of an internalized passivity among students, seriously hindering their ability for self-initiated learning, an essential skill for achieving high proficiency in a foreign language.
Thus, we should not be surprised to see that despite the fact that formal English-language education starts early (from grade 1 to grade 3 at public schools), along with the wide availability of after-school English language teaching services provided by private operators, the performance of students still falls short of expectations. A telling point is that the students’ Test of English for International Communication (TOIEC) scores peak while they are preparing for their national entrance exams during their senior high-school years, but decline afterward, as passing the tests is not required by their universities.
Harvard professor Lani Guinier coined the term “testocracy” to describe “a 21st-century cult of standardized, quantifiable merit that values perfect test scores, but ignores character” and argues that scores on exams are “accurate reflections of wealth and little else.”
According to Guinier, the overemphasis of high-stake standardized testing is a questionable means of accessing students’ actual ability as it reinforces a very narrow definition of “smartness” on the part of the test-taker.
Therefore, in essence, the education system in Taiwan can be considered a form of “testocracy” in action. Over the years, this dominant mode of teaching and learning has produced and subsequently reinforced the practices of “teach-to-test” and “learn-to-test” among parents, teachers and students. Under such a system, students are treated merely as “retrieval machines” overloaded with test-based material.
Driven largely by regimens of rote memorization, discipline, obedience and conformity, these practices numb the critical impulse and imagination of the students, while paying little regard to providing context for critical analysis and making knowledge meaningful. Such a narrowed vision of education has deprived our youngsters of the opportunities to develop their own ways of autonomous learning, problem-solving, independent thinking and collaborative undertaking and as a consequence, undermines national competitiveness.
If Taiwan truly wants to be a champion in cultivating its human resources, government policies should be geared toward treating education as a public good and a social investment by devising a system that allows each individual to flourish, rather than functioning as a sorting mechanism.
In addition, we need to recognize that learning does not only take place in the classroom, but also through “the educative nature of the culture” surrounding it. In its broadest expression, educational reforms should encompass the reform of minds, especially the minds of educators and policymakers.
Without such critical reflection, what we focus on will most likely be the shadow, rather than the substance of the problem.
Cheng Shiuh-tarng is a full-time elementary-school English teacher and a part-time assistant professor in Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages’ Department of English.
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers