The Taipei City Government plans to continue to use an unadjusted curriculum until the Ministry of Education resolves the controversy over its changes to high-school social science textbooks, the city government said yesterday.
The adjustments to the high-school curriculum have met with controversy, as numerous educators, academics and civic groups have said that the ministry’s changes did not follow procedure, while some of them are political in nature and try to enforce what academics called a “greater China” historical view, which ties Taiwan to China.
At a news conference after the city government policy meeting on Tuesday, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said that Taipei would stick with the old curriculum due to the ongoing unresolved legal issues pertaining to the current guidelines.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
In response, K-12 Education Administration Director Lee Hsiu-feng (李秀鳳) said a recent ruling by the Taipei High Administrative Court was focused only on a lack of information provided by the Ministry of Eucation, adding that the ruling did not mean that the contents or the procedure to make the adjustments were flawed.
“These are two completely different matters,” Lee said, referring to the court’s February ruling against the ministry’s decision to implement a controversial curriculum adjustment on grounds that it did not make the information more readily accessible to the public.
The suit was brought to court by the Taiwan Association for Human Rights against the Ministry of Education.
The ministry filed an appeal against the ruling on March 31, Lee said.
The ministry added that adhering to the new curriculum would help guarantee students’ rights in terms of examinations, as exams are to be based on the new version.
When asked whether individual schools would be able to use textbooks following the old curriculum, Lee said that such problems did not exist in the past, adding that textbooks, by law, should adhere to the most recent curriculum.
However, according to the city government’s Department of Education, the right to choose which textbooks to use belongs to individual schools.
While the department said it would notify all schools of the city government’s decision to stay with the old curriculum, it added that it would respect their choice if they were to follow the ministry’s decision and use the new curriculum.
The city government said that it would make available both the original and adjusted versions of textbooks for schools’ reference.
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