Minister of Education Huang Jong-tsun (
Huang said that it was necessary to clarify the targets before criticizing and evaluating educational reform.
"I think Lee is innocent. Almost every educational reform group fingered him as the arch-criminal, which is unfair to him," Huang said at a forum held by the Central News Agency entitled "Thorough inspection of 10 years of education reform."
Lee has come in for a great deal of criticism recently because in 1994 he chaired the Cabinet's ad hoc Educational Reform Evaluation Committee, which was the prime mover behind the reform effort.
Huang noted that the organizers and executives of the Educational Reform Evaluation Committee came from different groups and that although Lee served as the committee's convener, he did not single-handedly launch the educational reform effort.
"It is easy to place the blame on a certain target for a complicated event," Huang said.
Huang said the fundamental principle of the reform effort was fairness and justice.
"The Ministry of Education worked to achieve fairness and ensure that every student's educational rights are protected. If the educational reforms deviated from this direction then we have to correct it," he said. "I hope every educational reform group can put the election [next year's presidential election] aside and concentrate on the essence of education itself."
PFP Legislator Hsu Yuan-guo (
Hsu said there were three major problems with the 10-year educational reform effort that made it a failure: the scale was too large, the number of the colleges grew too quickly and graduates could not match the need of industry.
"It is very dangerous to launch educational reform with political intentions," he said.
"The reform was not success-ful, though it is arbitrary to say that it was a fiasco," DPP Legislator Cao Chi-Hong (
"What we need to do is to amend the present educational system in a timely manner," Cao said.
Organizing one national referendum and 26 recall elections targeting Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators could cost NT$1.62 billion (US$55.38 million), the Central Election Commission said yesterday. The cost of each recall vote ranges from NT$16 million to NT$20 million, while that of a national referendum is NT$1.1 billion, the commission said. Based on the higher estimate of NT$20 million per recall vote, if all 26 confirmed recall votes against KMT legislators are taken into consideration, along with the national referendum on restarting the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant, the total could be as much as NT$1.62 billion, it said. The commission previously announced
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday welcomed NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s remarks that the organization’s cooperation with Indo-Pacific partners must be deepened to deter potential threats from China and Russia. Rutte on Wednesday in Berlin met German Chancellor Friedrich Merz ahead of a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of Germany’s accession to NATO. He told a post-meeting news conference that China is rapidly building up its armed forces, and the number of vessels in its navy outnumbers those of the US Navy. “They will have another 100 ships sailing by 2030. They now have 1,000 nuclear warheads,” Rutte said, adding that such
Tropical Storm Nari is not a threat to Taiwan, based on its positioning and trajectory, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Nari has strengthened from a tropical depression that was positioned south of Japan, it said. The eye of the storm is about 2,100km east of Taipei, with a north-northeast trajectory moving toward the eastern seaboard of Japan, CWA data showed. Based on its current path, the storm would not affect Taiwan, the agency said.
The cosponsors of a new US sanctions package targeting Russia on Thursday briefed European allies and Ukraine on the legislation and said the legislation would also have a deterrent effect on China and curb its ambitions regarding Taiwan. The bill backed by US senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal calls for a 500 percent tariff on goods imported from countries that buy Russian oil, gas, uranium and other exports — targeting nations such as China and India, which account for about 70 percent of Russia’s energy trade, the bankroll of much of its war effort. Graham and Blumenthal told The Associated Press
RSS