Ninety percent of senior-high school principals in Taipei are against a central government policy to retire military instructors from campuses, a Taipei Department of Education survey has found.
The department this month conducted a survey among principals at 69 senior-high schools in Taipei, which found that 90 percent of them were against the Ministry of Education’s policy to replace military instructors with security guards, while 99 percent of respondents said that they were satisfied with military instructors’ service at their schools.
Military instructors are soldiers assigned by the Ministry of National Defense to high schools, colleges and universities to teach basic military training courses and protect students.
Photo: Shen Pei-yao, Taipei Times
The legislature in 2013 passed a supplementary resolution to an amendment to the Senior High School Education Act (高級中等教育法), which states that military instructors should be gradually retired from senior-high schools, by closing job vacancies — on the condition that student safety can be ensured — so that soldiers can reintegrate into the national defense system.
Seventy-four percent of principals said that they disagreed that instructors’ work can be handed over to security guards, according to the survey released on Friday.
Military instructors are no longer a symbol of authoritarian education, but are concerned with protecting students, preventing schoolyard bullying and violence and barring drugs and gangsters from entering campuses, the department said.
“The survey results showed that the majority of principals believe removing military instructors from campuses would give rise to a transitional period that would be unsafe for students,” it said.
The department said it would forward the survey results to the Ministry of Education and ask it to be prudent about its policy to retire military instructors.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei city councilors on the same day held a news conference to defend military instructors’ role on campuses.
The ministry has set out a plan to train 1,000 security guards every year and replace all instructors by 2021, but every security guard would only receive 70 hours of training.
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