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Editorial: Revolutionize education

Last week People First Party (PFP) Legislator Chin Wei-chu (秦慧珠) accused a member of the Examination Yuan of ideological bias for emphasizing Taiwan-centered history and geography in a grassroots civil-servant examination.

In a test for low-level civil servants set by the Examination Yuan the sections on national history and geography were composed of questions almost entirely about Taiwan. Many of the examinees were shocked by these "biased" questions, Chin fumed. What they expected to be examined on was the history and geography of a foreign country, not their own.

We assume that we don't have to defend the commonsense idea that people seeking jobs as public servants should know something about the place and people they want to serve. But Chin's kind of stupidity brings us close to despair. Can anyone think of any country where such a thing might be said and not provoke a torrent of derision? Imagine a legislator in the Irish Republic complaining that civil servants were examined on Irish, not British, history and geography. They would be scorned out of public life.

And the sad thing is that Chin, in a way, has a point. Not of course in her vicious prejudice against Taiwan and the Taiwanese language. But one could argue that it is unfair to test people on subjects they haven't been properly taught. And Taiwan's history and geography are things that the examinees have not been taught, except as a small part of the general education that all school students receive about China.

It is to redress this that the Ministry of Education has come up with a draft plan to restructure the high school history syllabus. The plan is to split history into three kinds, Taiwanese history, ancient Chinese history -- everything up to the end of the Ming dynasty -- and world history, which also includes Chinese history from the Ching onward. All this makes perfect sense. China, from where the vast majority of this country's people come, is studied up to the point at which the narrative thread of Taiwanese history begins, at which point history divides between domestic or foreign, Taiwan, and everywhere else. Under the plan the history of the Republic of China, at least pre-1945, is treated as foreign history which, in that it happened somewhere other than Taiwan, it certainly is.

Because the plan is so sensible, it has, of course, generated huge controversy. Conservatives are outraged over the view of Taiwan encapsulated in the syllabus, that it is somewhere that developed from China, by Chinese but that its history is its own and that China is only a part of that, an influence among many. It is a syllabus which is aimed at developing a "localized" consciousness. As such it is loathed by the unificationists who, appointed in the bad old days for their political loyalty rather than their scholarship, still dominate so much of the educational establishment and who have succeeded in frustrating other attempts to make the school syllabus more Taiwan-centric.

The history syllabus is just another battlefield in the long-running kulturkampf between those who want to develop a Taiwanese consciousness or nationalism, and those who cling to the icons of the alien Chinese Nationalist Party and its decades-long illegal occupation of this island. One of the problems with Taiwan's transition in the 1990s was that, because it was, thanks to Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), accomplished by peaceful consensus, there was never the rejection of these icons and the gutting of the system they represented that happened in countries where the ousting of colonial regimes needed more robust measures. The result has been seriously weakening to Taiwan's sense of identity.

Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) speaks foolishly of the Cultural Revolution still going on in Taiwan. Actually a revolution in Taiwan's cultural outlook is certainly needed, of which the education ministry's new history syllabus is an important -- and long overdue -- element.
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