On May 13, the Chinese-language United Daily News and the Presidential Office’s official Web site reported that President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) had received senior-high school students to discuss the challenges facing Taiwan in 10 years’ time and how to overcome them.
At first glance that is an exciting topic, but having read the report in the newspaper and on the office’s Web site, it became clear that her staff had not sufficiently prepared Tsai to comprehensively cover theoretical, international, forward-looking, pragmatic and innovative perspectives. She could therefore only “chat” with the carefully selected students, using fragmentary and fragile ideas that were out of step with global trends.
The president picked a very important and timely topic. Looking at Taiwan 10 years — or even 20 or 30 years from now — issues such as international relations, future careers, public issues and civic literacy, as well as the extended issues proposed by the president — cultivating talent, foreign-language learning and the global mobility of talent — are part of the national sustainability development effort to combine the resources of government, education, industry, scientific research and international governmental and non-governmental organizations that developed countries are working hard to achieve.
Tsai did not use data or concrete examples to convince the students, only saying: “To let the world see Taiwan, young people must first have the opportunity to travel... Whether they will depends on self-confidence.”
The president called on everyone to “be confident.”
Confidence requires abundant and diversified knowledge, language and communication skills, a lifelong learning attitude, good moral character and humanistic qualities. The question is how it will be possible to cultivate a lot of confident, talented people in Taiwan’s exam and cram-school-heavy education system.
Civic literacy and moral cultivation must be complemented by schools, family counseling and the national system. The quality of Finnish primary and secondary education is world-leading, and its educational philosophy is similar to Taiwan’s traditional education system: Teacher cultivation and family education come first. This secret to a happy education used to be part of Taiwan’s education system.
However, today, populism and legislative power have destroyed an admired education system and abandoned the high-school “civics and virtue” class. This runs counter to world trends and has led to endless chaos. It has also caused Taiwan to lose its once-proud position in the global competition for talent cultivation.
Encouraging high-school students to learn how to look at Taiwan 10 years from now requires reform of the education system.
When the students asked Tsai about the chaotic media situation, education reform and high-school curriculum guidelines, the president gave perfunctory answers about cultivating civic literacy, how value systems vary between generations, and telling the Cabinet and the Ministry of Education to persuade the high-school curriculum guideline committee to give students a bigger say in decisionmaking.
To respond to these problems, even the president cannot instruct the authorities to focus on in-depth research, objective judgment and effective implementation, which means that predicting what Taiwan will be like in 10 years will become even more difficult.
No wonder that Tsai said being president in 10 years’ time would be difficult. Considering her encouragement of and expectations for high-school students, this conclusion leaves room for discussion.
Li Chen-ching is a professor emeritus of Shih Hsin University’s English department, College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Translated by Lin Lee-kai
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