Miaoli County Government approved a proposal on Friday to fire three elementary-school teachers after they were found to have extracted confessions from their students under duress.
Liu Huo-chin (劉火欽), chief of the county government’s education bureau, said the three teachers, surnamed Chang (張), Wang (王) and Lin (林), “tried” students who were suspected of perceived infringements for hours, by means of “near coercion.”
Liu said their actions possibly violated the students’ rights to education, their personal freedom, involved possible criminal acts and certainly went beyond teachers’ rights to discipline students.
The three teachers, members of a group of seven female teachers who call themselves the “Magic Party,” were accused of locking a male student in a classroom and forcing him to write a confession when they suspected him of peeping at one of their clique while she was breastfeeding her child.
Local media reported that the student was kept in the classroom for five hours.
In another case, the teachers were reported to have kept a female student in a classroom for three hours and even forced her to take a written polygraph test when they suspected her of having an intimate relationship with a male teacher from the same school.
The Chinese-language Next Magazine reported last month that members of the clique have also been accused of speaking to students in an inappropriate manner and of “bullying” students, parents and fellow teachers.
Eleven fifth-graders transferred to other schools this semester because they did not want to be in the seven teachers’ classes, it reported.
The school’s principal,Yu Hui-ju (游惠茹), said a board of 15 people comprising herself, teachers and a parent representative voted on Oct. 23 to reach the proposal to expel the three from the faculty.
Chen Chih-hsueh (陳志學), who represented parents at the meeting, said the decision to fire the teachers was “reasonable” and “should have been taken a long time ago.”
He said he hopes the teachers’ departure will help students return to a normal learning environment and ensure teachers focus on teaching.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods