Many private kindergartens and day care centers voiced strong opposition to the new policy that will integrate their systems at a policy explanation conference held by the Ministry of Education (MOE) yesterday.
More than 400 kindergarten teachers, experts in preschool education, private kindergarten owners and parents from around the country attended the conference held at the National Taipei Teacher's College.
Opposition to the proposed new system has become intensified since the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) and the MOE announced on Wednesday that they would cooperate to initiate this new policy in early August.
Many private nurseries and kindergartens threatened to boycott the new system with their ballots in the presidential election. Many of them feared that they would be gradually eliminated from the preschool education market if the new policy were initiated.
Minister of Education Huang Jong-tsun (黃榮村) said on Wednesday that the functions of existing kindergartens and nursery schools or day care centers, that all fall in the range of preschool education, have been overlapping for a long time and caused many problems in management.
Under the new rule, the MOI will be in charge of the nursery schools and day care centers that received children under the age of five. The MOE will be responsible for preschool education provided to five and six-year-old children. This is planned as an extension of the national compulsory education system and will be free. The teachers practising preschool education will in future have to obtain teacher's certificates issued by the MOE according to their educational background.
"We are worried about the quality of many kindergartens and nursery schools. Many of them provide unpractical and over-merchandized courses to our children," Huang said.
"The new policy aims to provide a better learning environment to all young children, which is good for the nation's education in the long run," he said.
After the ministry's officials explained the draft plan at the conference yesterday, many participants still expressed their opposition to the policy and criticized it as badly designed and neglecting the practical needs of preschoolers.
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
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater