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Ma pledges to increase education budget if elected

Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday promised to increase the education budget to NT$700 billion (US$21 billion), or 6 percent of the nation's GDP, in eight years and improve the quality of education, if he is elected next year.

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.
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