City leaders at the Executive Yuan’s Cabinet meeting yesterday claimed to have received a positive response from Premier Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) over funding to reprint textbooks.
The Executive Yuan said it respects a resolution made during cross-caucus talks on Tuesday that grants high schools the right to choose between textbooks printed before or after adjustments were implemented to history curriculum guidelines on Saturday last week.
A joint proposal was made to the Cabinet by Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊), Tainan Mayor William Lai (賴清德), Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) and Taichung Mayor Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍), asking the Executive Yuan to assure the effectiveness of the old curriculum guidelines, offer public funding for reprinting if schools choose to use old textbooks, and uphold transparency and openness as the basic principles for the upcoming review of the guidelines.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
The Executive Yuan said that it has asked the Ministry of Education to immediately launch a project to set up review councils to examine the guidelines based on the principles of procedural justice and educational neutrality.
It said the councils’ composition should reflect professionalism and public credibility, and respond to social expectations.
Mao said the construction of a set of transparent and credible procedures and mechanisms can be achieved through legislation that guarantees education neutrality, so education materials would not be swayed by a particular set of views.
The Executive Yuan said it has asked the ministry to conduct an evaluation and deal with financial aid for schools that choose to use old textbooks.
While Executive Yuan spokesperson Sun Lih-chyun (孫立群) said the premier did not make any promises on the issue, Kaohsiung and Tainan officials released statements saying that both city’s mayors said that Mao had made a clear, positive response to the question of whether the ministry would defray costs arising from switching to old textbooks.
The mayors said Mao did not make any affirmative promise over the promulgation of the previous curriculum guidelines to assure their effectiveness, but only said that textbooks based on the old guidelines would be made available.
Separately, Deputy Minister of Education Lin Teng-chiao (林騰蛟) backed away from previous statements suggesting that the ministry would cover the costs of schools that want to switch back to textbooks based on pre-adjusted guidelines.
The ministry would only pay for “supplementary materials” explaining the guideline adjustments, Lin said.
Most schools had already completed their textbook selection process when the ministry announced in June that controversial portions of the curriculum guidelines would not be tested.
Additional reporting by Abraham Gerber
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