Sat, May 05, 2007 page4

• Education alliance pans MOE's localization drive

  • By Max Hirsch / STAFF REPORTER
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  The Ministry of Education is taking "localization" too far as high school students nationwide fall behind in their Chinese-language ability, the Alliance to Save the National Language said yesterday.

  Composed of academics, the alliance yesterday attacked the education ministry's curricula planning for high schools nationwide, saying that its latest plan, which alliance spokeswoman Lee Su-chen (李素真) said wouldn't be officially unveiled until next year, was already leaning toward striking more classical Chinese courses off the curricula.

  Promulgated by the education ministry in 2005, the last curriculum plan for high schools dramatically slashed the number of classical Chinese-related courses while adding more "vernacular" language classes, the alliance said.

  

  Tu Chung-kao, a professor at National Taiwan Normal University, says the Ministry of Education is taking ``localization'' too far as high school students nationwide are falling behind in their Chinese-language ability.

  PHOTO: SEAN CHAO, TAIPEI TIMES

  The ratio of vernacular to classical courses is now skewed in favor of the former by up to 20 percent, leaving students in the dark as to crucial elements of the Chinese language and culture, it said.

  "The localization of education is getting out of hand," said alliance member Tu Chung-kao (杜忠誥), a professor of Chinese at National Taiwan Normal University. "We all live under a Chinese cultural system. It's a joke to associate millennia-old Chinese culture [solely] with the People's Republic of China."

  Alliance members and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Diane Lee (李慶安) said that while the ratio of vernacular to classical courses remained unchanged in the plan to be announced next year, the education ministry has designated many formerly prerequisite classical courses as "optional."

  "The ratio looks unchanged," Lee Su-chen said, "but actually, the education ministry has canceled a lot of classical courses and expanded others [within the space allotted for classical education in curricula]."

  The result of such cut-backs on classical education, Diane Lee said, is a whole generation of high school students whose command of the Chinese language is faulty or shallow. More than 90 percent of middle school teachers lament their students' poor grasp of the finer points of Chinese, she added.

  In a phone interview last night, Chen Yi-hsing (陳益興), who oversees high school curricula planning as the ministry's director of secondary education, said that before 1998, secondary students attended six days of school, allowing for more in-depth study of all subjects.

  Since two days of rest per week for students became mandatory nearly a decade ago, coursework in all subjects, not just Chinese, has been reduced, he said.

  "That's when the cut-back on classical Chinese education began," he said.

  As for the current division of coursework between vernacular and classical classes, Chen said that Taiwan's ratio was still higher than high schools in China.

  "I don't have the statistics on hand now, but we're still emphasizing classical education more than the Chinese," he said

  "We place great emphasis on the study of classical Chinese, and we look forward to the alliance's feedback and participation in further planning [of future high school curricula]," he said.
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