A student leader yesterday asked President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to withdraw controversial curriculum guideline changes at a meeting held at National Taiwan University. Ma rejected the appeal, saying that “people on the other side” would oppose such a move and the demand is “out of proportion.”
Taipei Private Yan Ping High School student Lin Yen-ting (林彥廷), spokesperson for an alliance of students in schools in northern Taiwan who oppose what they call a set of “China-centric” adjustments to high-school curriculum guidelines, presented the alliance’s demands to the president.
Saying that the Ministry of Education made the proposed changes in an opaque, undemocratic way and that the contents were controversial, Lin asked Ma whether he could promise to have the proposed guidelines abolished and open the revision process to public discussion to represent pluralistic historical representations.
Photo: Wang Min-wei, Taipei Times
Ma said that he has examined what critics said were controversial changes and found that they accounted for less than half of all the proposed changes.
“If more than half of the proposed changes were controversial, we do have to back to square one, but it seemed that there were not many. There were about just 100,” Ma said.
He said the student’s demand should conform to the “principle of proportionality,” although it was “not a bad idea” to allow public participation in writing the guidelines.
Ma said that the dispute over the decisionmaking process in making the changes should be resolved through the ongoing litigation, adding that the ministry had its reason to hold back information as to who was involved in the process.
It was wrong to claim that the history of the 228 Incident was deleted in the proposed version because his administration would not allow that to happen, Ma added.
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