While the opposition parties were launching a protest yesterday against the high tuition fees and education reform and other complaints, the Ministry of Education was holding a seminar to talk about its National Conference on Educational Development to be held on Sept. 13 and Sept.14.
The conference aims to review the results of the education reforms and further work out new plans for future education policies.
The conference is to address three topics: increasing education opportunities for minority groups and ensuring the social justice; promoting the quality and effectiveness of higher education quality and and improving international competitiveness; and completing the reforms of the 12-year compulsory education program.
"It is critical to discuss these three issues and work out the solutions. If we do not deal with them now, I believe that the controversy of education reform will still exist in 10 years," education minister Huang Jong-tsun (
"However, it is also difficult to find the solutions that satisfy all people. If a consensus that leads to a correct direction can be formed, then the conference has reached its preliminary mission," Huang said.
Huang said that is futile for people to continue the debate about the need for more universities versus need for better universities. Instead, he said, people who are concerned about education reform need to think about effective solutions.
The new curricula need to be designed with justice and fairness in mind, Huang said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching