Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (
The budget would be used to provide free preschool education to five-year-old children to ease parents' financial burden, decrease the number of students per class in elementary schools from 35 to 25 and to promote a "Horse Gallop" program, which would push for more foreign student exchanges.
"As a small country, we need to be more internationalized. The program will deepen the country's academic strength and broaden local students' vision," Ma told a press conference yesterday in Taipei.
In the space of four years, the exchange program would sponsor 10,000 Taiwanese students to attend foreign schools, while inviting 20,000 foreign students to attend local schools, Ma said.
In an effort to promote cross-strait exchanges, Ma also vowed to push for the recognition of diplomas earned at Chinese universities if elected.
Condemning Minister of Education Tu Cheng-sheng (杜正勝) for injecting political ideology into the curriculum, Ma pledged to invite neutral academics and professionals to establish new education policies.
"Officials in education agencies should not be campaigning for politicians or promote a certain party's ideology," he said.
If elected, Ma said he would promote traditional Chinese culture through education and cultivate a "tolerant, open, deep and rich" self-awareness of the Taiwanese identity, rather than "shallow, narrow and self-pitying regionalism."
"Being Taiwanese doesn't mean that we can't appreciate Chinese culture and history ? We also need to prepare the next generation with global knowledge and language skills," he said.
Ma criticized the government's education reforms for confusing parents and students by complicating admission channels, and pledged to establish an evaluation committee to review the multiple school admission systems.
If elected, Ma said he would budget NT$10 billion to improve vocational education, while conducting a quality control review of the nation's colleges and universities.
"It's horrifying that it now only takes a score of 18 to be admitted to college. We need to have quality control in the country's higher education," he said.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
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