Hualien middle school student Peter Chang (
"They say to me, `Hey, what do you know?'" Peter says, adding: "But in the US, they let you speak your mind in class -- they won't laugh."
For Albert Liao (
PHOTO: CNA
Joined by 20 or so elementary and middle school students recently returned from Washington, Peter and Albert led the charge against the Taiwanese education system yesterday at a Taipei press conference hosted by the King Car Foundation, a non-government organization devoted to improving education in Taiwan.
"In Taiwan, we don't dare open our mouths in the classroom. We just cram for tests here. But in the US, the students there do stuff -- fun stuff," said 14-year-old Angel Chen (
Buried under books and pressured to churn out test scores becoming of an astrophysicist with total recall, Taiwanese children are losing out on vital aspects of their overall education, says King Car director Morgan Sun (孫慶國).
Yesterday's students were the first batch of youngsters to visit a US school to see firsthand what curricula devoted to fostering critical thinking skills and high "emotional quotients" -- not rote memorization and exam marks -- entails, Sun said.
"Education should be about teaching students to analyze and conceptualize rather than just memorize," he said, adding that subsequent groups of students to be bankrolled for similar overseas adventures would include many kids from low-income families.
"We need to give needy students more opportunities to get ahead," Sun said.
Students yesterday recounted tales of attending a raucous Blazers versus Suns match, hanging out with their American peers, sampling burgers and immersing themselves in a way of life they hadn't known before.
Although three weeks may seem like a short time, their travels to the other side of the world and straight into the fabric of small-town USA -- and back again -- have transformed them at their core, their parents said.
"Oh, he is so much more confident now," said Albert's mother, Yen Feng-ying (
Yen blamed "tradition" for the focus on rote memorization and test performance in Taiwanese schools, saying that Albert needed to experience a less stressful yet enriching environment like the one at Shahala.
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