Minister of Education Wu Se-hwa (吳思華) yesterday said that the new curriculum guidelines should be followed in new textbooks set to be printed and would be used to draw up college entrance examination questions, despite widespread criticism.
The legislature’s Education and Culture Committee again invited the minister and other related public officials to report on the curriculum adjustments, which opposition legislators and civic groups have said were made dishonestly, and move students toward a Chinese-centered perspective.
Since the Taipei City Government recently said that its schools would continue using the unadjusted curriculum amid ongoing legal issues pertaining to the new one, five of the six special municipalities — barring the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-governed New Taipei City — have decided to stick to the previous curriculum.
KMT legislators Kung Wen-chi (孔文吉) and Chen Shu-hui (陳淑慧) expressed their worries over the “one country, two systems” problem concerning the textbooks and its possible effect on students, with Chen questioning the legitimacy of Taipei City Government’s calling on the ministry to avoid including contentious parts of the new curriculum in the nationwide exams.
“The new curriculum guidelines would be an executive regulation by which the schools should abide. With their promulgation, the old curriculum would cease to exist, and the exams would be based on the new curriculum,” Wu said.
Taiwan Solidarity Union Legislator Lai Cheng-chang (賴振昌) challenged Wu’s statement, saying that the emergence of a new curriculum does not automatically invalidate an older one.
Democratic Progressive Party legislators Cheng Li-chun (鄭麗君) and Ho Hsin-chun (何欣純) said that as the license issued by the ministry for printing textbooks based on the old curriculum would not expire until 2018, there should be no legal prohibition against using textbooks based on the old curriculum.
Refusing to respond directly to the question of whether the license is legal, Wu repeated that the previous curriculum should be replaced.
Conventions have guided the process of the replacement of the old with the new curriculum, “and since there had been little controversy in the past, the invalidation of the old textbook license was never officially required. However, without it, we have an ambiguous situation now,” KMT Legislator Chen Pi-han (陳碧涵) said.
Challenged by Cheng on the adjustment-making procedures, which she accused of being illegitimate and flawed, the minister appeared piqued and urged the legislator to “point out the controversial parts to allow [all] to face [the contention] in a sensible way.”
However, when Cheng picked up his appeal for opening up and requested a new round of public hearings on the parts met with disputes, Wu said “the writing of the [new] textbooks has been finished” and the ministry will “showcase the new textbooks for public examination.”
The committee, after hours of negotiation, resolved the passage of two extemporaneous motions: that the ministry will respect each school’s right on textbook choosing, and that the College Entrance Examination Center will avoid controversial topics when designing the exams.
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