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Educators work on reform jump-start

The National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), the nation's leading teacher's educational organization, is holding a symposium today to propose new strategies to redirect the reform just two days after President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) presented six suggestions to help ameliorate the problems resulting from education reform.

"Actually, we care about education reform more than anybody," said the president of NTNU, Chien Maw-fa (簡茂發), yesterday at a press conference on the goals of the symposium. "Nevertheless, society often criticize us for being conventional, conservative and reluctant to change," he said.

In fact, Chien said, most teachers in the educational system do not know how to follow the extensive changes proposed by the original reform, but tried hard to adjust to new policies proposed by the Ministry of Education.

"We hope the ministry stops issuing new policies like the 12-year compulsory education program and instead solves existing problems first. The nine-year program is a good lesson. Stop using students and teachers as guinea pigs," said Pan Hui-lin (潘慧玲), director of the Center for Educational Research at NTNU and the executor of the symposium entitled "The New Direction of Education Development: Writing a Prescription for Education Reform."

"Many non-governmental organizations have launched protests against the educational reform agenda and we also found that they have failed to provide constructive suggestions. I think it is time for us to give society some meat," she said.

The research team of NTNU, Pan said, has devised eight topics for education reform that will be thoroughly discussed at the symposium. They are: higher education, technological and vocational education, preschool education, the nine-year educational program, the enrollment scheme, training for teachers, the educational administration and the educational system.

"All the topics focus on people because students and teachers are the core of the education," Pan said.

Some of the topics that NTNU posed overlapped with President Chen's suggestions. Chen suggested at Friday's conference to reduce the diversified enrollment scheme to two principle ways of recommendation and examination. He also advised the ministry to hold a united examination to evaluate teachers' eligibility in order to solve the high rate of unemployment among graduates of teachers' universities.

Chen said that technical and vocational schools should not be abolished, but said that the ministry should carry out a plan for certification so that graduates have a better chance of finding employment.

However, Wu Wu-tien (吳武典), director of College of Education at NTNU, said in the press conference that it might not be a good time for Chen to offer his suggestions.

"President Chen's suggestions came prior to the upcoming National Conference on Educational Development on Sept. 13 and 14, which makes people feel that he wants to dominate the issue. Besides, some of his suggestions are existing Ministry of Education policies," Wu said.
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