With so many academics and experts worrying about the "digital divide" between the city and the countryside, we should discuss the methods used by the Ministry of Education to draw up the school curriculum.
In 1983, the ministry included an introduction to computers as a senior high school elective. In 1995, the name of the course was changed to "Computers," the guidelines were revised, and it was recommended that the course be taught during the second or the third year for two hours each week. The guidelines remain to this day.
In the Temporary Guidelines for the Senior High School Curriculum announced in August last year, however, computer classes were removed from the compulsory and elective curriculums for senior high school. Computer classes can now only be found with some difficulty, by looking at the home economics, daily life technologies and information categories, but these still must compete for limited elective credits with 11 other subjects.
More seriously, the home economics and daily life technologies electives have already been made part of compulsory classes in the "daily life" section of the curriculum, from which each student must take at least two credits. One can only ask how many schools would be willing to offer an elective like "information" in this area, given that the computers elective cannot reincarnate itself as another subject. This is the same thing as telling schools that there is no need to offer computer classes at all. In fact, the release of the temporary guidelines for next year resulted in many schools instructing their teachers that computer classes will not be offered as an elective.
The computers elective is the only one to be excluded from the ministry's temporary curriculum guidelines. Detailed guidelines are provided for all other electives, such as knowledge of national defense, moral thought and choice, sex and marital ethics, life and technological ethics, character and mind, and career planning. I am not going to argue that computer classes are more important than the other electives, but I do want to ask why the ministry has decided against computer classes.
The guidelines from 1995 suggest that computer classes be taught for two hours a week in senior high school. Today, this subject has all but disappeared. How can it be that what was appropriate to teach yesterday is inappropriate today? Or that children in the digital era no longer need to learn how to use computers? The rich-poor gap and the digital divide between urban and rural areas grow ever larger. If computer classes are removed from the public school curriculum, it will mean that children in remote areas or from poor households will become even more disadvantaged.
Computers have been relegated to a single issue in the nine-year compulsory school plan instead of serving as a full-fledged subject. We must ask ourselves whether or not this means that children from socially and economically disadvantaged families will lose their only chance to learn about computers and thus be abandoned by the information society.
When the ministry completed the draft Temporary Guidelines for the Senior High School Curriculum in 2002, it held public hearings throughout the country. At each hearing, teachers and academics reminded the ministry that it should not ignore computer education.
The ministry obviously ignored these opinions, and since then the senior high school curriculum development committee has continued to avoid including information experts or academic representatives among its number. Nor have there been any plans for a computer curriculum.
Advanced countries such as the US, Britain, Japan and Israel make computer classes part of their compulsory or elective curriculums, and they include the subject in university entrance exams. Even China made computer studies, or "information technology" as it is called there, compulsory for high school students starting in 2000, and the class is part of provincial-level exams.
Taiwan has placed the utmost importance on information technology, and it is the information industry that has created the wealth and progress of recent years. It is very difficult to understand why the ministry is moving against these developments and the trends seen in advanced countries.
It is noteworthy that 12,000 high school graduates go on to study information technology-related courses at university every year. This is more than one out of every 10 students. If our children cannot be given more exposure to computer knowledge and skills in senior high school, Taiwan will not be able to nurture further talent in the information technology field.
The ministry's curriculum guidelines remain in place for a decade. The disappearance of computer studies will therefore affect the IT abilities and future competitiveness of 2 million elementary and middle school students over this time. What neglect.
I anxiously wait for the ministry to take precautions by adding computer curriculum guidelines to the senior high school curriculum, while at the same time studying the possibility of making computer studies compulsory in senior high school. In addition, I call on the ministry to follow the strict methods of the past by gathering experts, academics, senior high school computer teachers and administrative officials to convene a committee to this end. It is not enough to simply ask one or two academics to write a rough outline.
Janet Mea-chuen Lin is professor and chair of the Department of Information and Computer Education at National Taiwan Normal University.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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