The topic of “character education” has made front-page news recently, with many reports describing this as an increasingly serious concern. The media are now focusing on this issue in the hope that it will receive proper attention and the opportunities for personal development will gradually improve, or at least not deteriorate any further.
Recent reports have alleged a link between the failure of society to educate, a lack of correct attitudes in the workplace and public safety issues on the Taipei Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system.
Character education is different from technical training or the transmission of knowledge. Even if someone has read a few books, completed courses or passed tests to gain a certain qualification, this is not a guarantee that everything will be alright when it comes to character.
This means that giving courses in character education are inadequate, which in turn means that it is inappropriate to blame the criminal actions of a university student on the failure of character education at universities. Character education is a long-term, wide-ranging project and the policy for it requires a lot of time for planning from a macro-perspective, and at ministerial level.
However, teaching how to apply what has been learned, as well as correct workplace attitude, should be the responsibility of universities teaching science and technology. If lecturers never interact with the business world, how can we expect students to learn how to apply knowledge? Since they have never been to an actual workplace and experienced it for themselves, the idea of correct workplace attitude is abstract.
Lately, my colleagues and I have had frequent contact with a major display manufacturer in the Southern Taiwan Science Park as well as at its satellite plant. We have reached the following agreement: The teaching materials at our department will cover areas that the company needs and managers at the company will participate in the evaluation of the students’ grades at the end of each semester.
In addition to evaluating the students’ technical knowledge, the assessment will also concern the students’ attitude. The students who pass the evaluation will become candidates for employment at the company. While we were discussing this, we also invited managers from the company to our school to share their experiences in the workplace with students and to lead them on tours of the company.
Before these interactions between managers and students take place, we reinforce the importance of attitude to our students and when they take part in tours of an actual workplace, they are able to feel for themselves how important attitude in the workplace is. It can therefore be seen that practical skills and attitude are two things that can be learned simultaneously.
Lastly, it is worth mentioning an article that appeared in the Chinese-language United Daily News on Saturday last week about how teachers at private universities are worried because of Taiwan’s declining birth rate.
It is foreseeable that the low birth rate will result in many university lecturers losing their positions. Instead of just standing by and watching this happen, they should begin opening up doors for themselves by interacting with different industries. This would not only increase the competitiveness of their students when it comes to gaining employment, but also create opportunities for professors to change jobs if necessary.
Perhaps this is fate — in the future, lecturers will not be able to just sit in their ivory towers, they will also have to go out and engage with society.
Chen Sheng-chung is the head of the Department of Optoelectronic Engineering at Far East University.
Translated by Drew Cameron
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