Emotional education
The Ministry of Justice recently proposed a draft amendment to the Civil Code that would lower the nation’s legal age of adulthood from 20 to 18, so that 18-year-olds could enjoy the same rights that people over the age of 20 have.
The part of the draft that has attracted the most attention is the article that would allow a person to marry at the age of 18 without parental consent.
Since the release of the draft, many parents have expressed concern that their children would still be too mentally immature at that age and that they therefore might be incapable of making such a permanent decision.
There is much room for improvement in the emotional education provided by Taiwanese high schools.
In junior and senior-high schools, student counseling courses focus on instruction in occupational exploration, family education and self-understanding. After the new curriculum guidelines were launched last year, there has been a big increase in the proportion of gender equality education, which has compressed the space for students to receive emotion-related knowledge at school.
No wonder the draft has raised questions.
However, the only way to solve a problem is by facing it head on.
If the government is willing to address parents’ concerns and anxiety about their children by enhancing the emotion-related instruction at school, it could fundamentally improve teenagers’ ability to be responsible for themselves.
As a junior-high school student, I hope that lowering Taiwan’s legal age of adulthood will become a consensus among all parties. Hopefully the government will be able to continue to push for emotional education, so that society at large will put greater trust and confidence in teenagers.
Tseng Ching-yao
New Taipei City
Inaccurate information
As a communication professional teaching future generations of communicators the “tricks of the trade,” I found the article about the King Car Cultural and Educational Foundation survey on media literacy very informative and somewhat troubling (“One-fifth of students would ignore inaccurate info: poll,” July 9, page 2).
I will be teaching an “Introduction to Public Relations” and a “Media Ethics” course this fall semester at the University of Tampa, and I fully intend to provide the statistics in both classes.
Sadly, I am not completely surprised at the sense of complacency indicated in this poll.
When I challenge my own students on the origin of their “information,” more often than not the response is: “I saw it online.”
When I then follow up with: “Did you verify the information somewhere else?” the reply is, simply: “No.”
The growing prevalence of social media, with its “no holds barred” tendency to foster the spread of information — true and untrue — with no one to question the validity, is at best, worrisome.
All too often, the reading or viewing public is “treated” to a barrage of words casting doubt on the abilities of a particular individual or touting extravagant claims of a product or service.
I would hope that fellow educators take the data contained in this survey and incorporate it into their own curricula with the goal of raising awareness of (to use a term uncomfortably popular in the US) “fake media” and the potential spreading of faulty or blatantly incorrect information.
As always, the caution is caveat lector, or let the reader beware.
Kirk Hazlett
Adjunct professor of communication
University of Tampa, Tampa, Florida
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