Controversy over proposed high-school curriculum adjustments continued yesterday, with arguments breaking out in a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Education and Culture Committee.
Claiming violations of procedural rules, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators boycotted a motion by the committee chair Chen Ting-fei (陳亭妃) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) seeking to pick up a motion from the committee’s session on Monday — which was cut short after Minister of Education Wu Se-hwa (吳思華) left early for a meeting.
The boycott lead to two hours of shouting and arguing between members of the KMT and DPP caucuses before the committee moved to send the motions directly to the general assembly for resolution.
Photo: CNA
The dropped motions called for the committee to take a position on a lawsuit faced by the Ministry of Education over controversial changes to the national high-school curriculum.
The Taipei High Administrative Court ruled last month that the ministry should publicize materials related to the National Academy for Educational Research’s resolution to revise the curriculum guidelines, which fueled controversy over what some critics deemed “sinicization.”
Even if passed, the motions would have been symbolic, lacking legal power to obligate the ministry to publicize the material.
Meanwhile, Wu yesterday reiterated that the ministry would appeal the court’s ruling last month that it publicize its curriculum review procedures — including a list of review board members and meeting minutes.
Wu said that the appeal is to be filed to obtain clarification on to what extent the transparency of review committees should be maintained for future reference.
Also, as review committee name lists are made public only after the implementation of curriculum adjustments for fear of unnecessary hassles that the exposure might cause during reviews, Wu said, the ministry would protest to the court for maintaining its current practice.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Cheng Li-chiun (鄭麗君) said during the committee’s question-and-answer session on Monday, based on the review meeting minutes she posted the night before on Facebook, that the curriculum adjustment was “illegally initiated” in 2013.
She accused the review committee — originally convened to examine wording in textbooks — of overreaching its authority by launching extempore motions to make “minor adjustments” to the curriculum guidelines.
Saying that there is no need for Wu to bear former minister Chiang Wei-ning’s (蔣偉寧) liabilities, Cheng called on Wu to halt and revoke the rollout of the curriculum.
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
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
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