Opening a newspaper a few days ago, I saw a horribly shocking photograph of a pair of sneakers standing next to a puddle of blood. Yet another high school student had jumped off a building because of pressure at school and psychological distress. The parents were crying and the school president was kneeling down.
Every time such a tragedy occurs it is followed by meetings at the school where county and city education officials show their concern and urge the school to strengthen its day to day counseling services. These services include contacting and communicating with parents, paying attention to student behavior, telling students that school is not everything in life and improving social networking through organized activities and skill development.
The school of the student who committed suicide had already made an appointment for a counseling meeting later that week with the student's parents. Unfortunately, it was too late. These meetings are only effective with some students and their parents and cannot really remove heavy school pressures and psychological stress.
So what causes these suicides? It is simply the competition for acceptance into higher education.
There is a serious shortage of outstanding public high schools and universities. Some towns don't even have a decent public high school. This means that neither the multiple entrance system or a system with multiple texts and diversified knowledge are capable of resolving the pressure experienced by students to get in to a good high school or university. Instead, these approaches add to the pain and the burden.
Many academics and civic leaders often repeat that admission competition is a process necessary for social progress. Admitting students who are not suited to higher education to public senior high schools or universities is both a waste of public funds and an abuse of sorts of those students.
The right to education today is a fundamental civic right, and at the tender age of 14 or 15, students are graded and forced to participate in the cruel competition for admission to the right school: missing the cut by one or two points means vocational school.
This system deprives students of their right to choose their own educational path, and from a competitive perspective, it is also extremely unfair to students with few educational resources or students from economically disadvantaged families. This is a particular irony in a developed country like Taiwan, where GDP per capita has exceeded US$14,000 and which actively works to deepen democracy, human rights, fairness and justice, and claims to stress education.
Thirteen years ago, the 410 Education Reform Association proposed four major policies, and a seven-year, NT$350 billion special education budget. Prior to the presidential election, both major parties gladly promised to implement the budget, but after the elections, the buck was passed.
It is infuriating to see that rather than spending this money on education issues that would improve the educational level of everyone, they would rather spend it on the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant despite a lack of consensus for its construction, the high speed rail build-operate-transfer project which shouldn't require any public funds, and paying off hundreds of billions of Taiwan dollars in bad loans resulting from embezzlement in large corporations.
If the president and the Cabinet had implemented the budget suggested by the 410 Education Reform Association as promised, today's junior high school students would not have to fret over their senior high school entrance exams but would instead study in high quality combined high schools in their local communities.
In addition to basic civic studies, they would be able to choose philosophy, psychology and technical arts. Through observation, thought and discussion students could learn to understand their own disposition, interests, and potential as well as the rights and responsibilities of modern citizens.
After graduating from high school, they would be able to choose to study in outstanding public universities or schools for the technical arts, try to be accepted at national comprehensive or research-oriented universities or seek employment. Students would be happier at school and there would be less suicide.
A capitalist country that is only concerned with economic development and neglects the education of its people will surely have an unfair, undemocratic and environmentally unfriendly economy. Taiwan is a good example of this.
On this foundation, it is futile to talk about liberty, democracy, rule of law, human rights, environmental rights, social stability, ethnic conciliation and cultural innovation and hope to gain the respect of the international community.
The strange thing is that despite the importance of this issue, I still haven't heard any of the presidential or legislative candidates make any concrete policy suggestions on education.
Why do the presidential and legislative candidates of the major parties, who always talk about public welfare, keep quiet when they clearly see how the younger generation are suffering, with some of them even taking their own lives? This really makes me worry about Taiwan's democracy and wonder whether "justice" really will be the core value of the future of Taiwan.
Chang Tse-chou is the head of Banciao Community University.
Translated by Perry Svensson
On Monday, the day before Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) departed on her visit to China, the party released a promotional video titled “Only with peace can we ‘lie flat’” to highlight its desire to have peace across the Taiwan Strait. However, its use of the expression “lie flat” (tang ping, 躺平) drew sarcastic comments, with critics saying it sounded as if the party was “bowing down” to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Amid the controversy over the opposition parties blocking proposed defense budgets, Cheng departed for China after receiving an invitation from the CCP, with a meeting with
In the event of a war with China, Taiwan has some surprisingly tough defenses that could make it as difficult to tackle as a porcupine: A shoreline dotted with swamps, rocks and concrete barriers; conscription for all adult men; highways and airports that are built to double as hardened combat facilities. This porcupine has a soft underbelly, though, and the war in Iran is exposing it: energy. About 39,000 ships dock at Taiwan’s ports each year, more than the 30,000 that transit the Strait of Hormuz. About one-fifth of their inbound tonnage is coal, oil, refined fuels and liquefied natural gas (LNG),
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) is leading a delegation to China through Sunday. She is expected to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing tomorrow. That date coincides with the anniversary of the signing of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), which marked a cornerstone of Taiwan-US relations. Staging their meeting on this date makes it clear that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intends to challenge the US and demonstrate its “authority” over Taiwan. Since the US severed official diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979, it has relied on the TRA as a legal basis for all
Taiwan ranks second globally in terms of share of population with a higher-education degree, with about 60 percent of Taiwanese holding a post-secondary or graduate degree, a survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development showed. The findings are consistent with Ministry of the Interior data, which showed that as of the end of last year, 10.602 million Taiwanese had completed post-secondary education or higher. Among them, the number of women with graduate degrees was 786,000, an increase of 48.1 percent over the past decade and a faster rate of growth than among men. A highly educated population brings clear advantages.
RSS