Imagining better education
I agree with Herbert Hanreich’s thesis; Taiwan’s education system is in crisis (“Empty phrases pollute education,” Sept. 29, page 8).
That being said, this is a worldwide phenomenon. Education systems everywhere are failing students. Why? There are many answers put forward with solutions. However, few seem to galvanize the minds of young people. International unemployment for people under the age of 25 is nearing 25 percent. Negative statistics are omnipresent. I take a more pragmatic approach to solving the problem.
Begin with the practical reality. We are not going to change the mindset of bureaucrats and parents without a pedagogical revolution. Authority figures have been immersed in a US-style system that has been coupled with Confucian values: an unfortunate intermingling. In the modern world, young people know that the pursuit of the “American Dream,” freedom through financial independence, is a hollow fantasy and not worth devoting one’s life to.
The solution lies in giving students belief in their plans and dreams: to live in the world of imagination. The job of educators and the public is to build a community of young people who maintain a conviction in themselves. This can be done one person at a time.
They must be instilled with the beliefs, “My life is precious and unique,” “I have something to offer the world,” “I do not want to be wage slave.”
This can be achieved, as Mahatma Gandhi showed us in his 1930 Salt March. We can begin humbly and yet accomplish great things. In this way, we will create a new system of thinking and a novel way of living.
Leon E. La Couvee
Taipei
Never ready for unification
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said “Taiwan is not ready” to discuss unification. Could there be any more telling a testament to his utter misunderstanding of the nature of Taiwan and its people? Is it any surprise that he sounds like a Chinese unification minister ruefully noting how damn long it is taking for Taiwan to just surrender to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)?
Just how does a democratic nation with a vibrant culture and economy, excellent quality of life and free society prepare to surrender it all to a totalitarian dictatorship with re-education camps and no freedom?
How does a free nation of people with their own language, history, culture, food and beliefs prepare to give it all up to one of the world’s most brutal regimes?
How does a country that meets all of the definitions of a nation, fighting for recognition and independence from tyranny and oppression, condemn its children, grandchildren and posterity to lives of sadness and death, recrimination, purges and cultural genocide at the hands of the CCP, one of the world’s most vicious political parties?
How does one willingly give up freedom for tyranny, free thought for brainwashing, religious freedom for religion with Chinese characteristics, ie, no religious freedom?
How does anyone give up a government by its express constitutional definition “of the people, by the people and for the people” for a dictatorship run by a single party bereft of democratic principles, freedom, human rights, justice, tolerance and dignity?
Those hallowed words of government derived from a speech given by former US president Abraham Lincoln almost 152 years ago at Gettysburg in 1863 came to the attention of a young Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙).
I am reminded of Lincoln’s words during the terrible US Civil War, which was fought to preserve the great concept of government, written to a mother who had lost five sons in the war: “I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”
How very different the mindsets of the two presidents: Ma and Lincoln. Both faced with adversity, one brave to move heaven and Earth to preserve the people’s form of government, the other so morose that he could not achieve a complete surrender to tyranny during his eight-year tenure. There are in history the Lincolns and Churchills, and then there are the Philippe Petains and the Mas.
Nobody should or can be forced to march backward.
Ma, when he said, almost with disappointment, that Taiwan is not ready to discuss unification, showed his weakness and utter misunderstanding of Taiwanese and the freedoms they enjoy, despite his and the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) efforts to eradicate them.
Taiwan will never be ready to join totalitarianism, and the KMT cannot be trusted to protect Taiwanese, and their hard won freedoms and way of life.
Lee Longhwa
Los Angeles
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