Although President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has said that many people do not exercise because they are lazy, the Child Welfare League Foundation said the lack of facilities, time and diversity in physical education (PE) is the principal reason why young Taiwanese are reluctant to exercise.
“It’s worrisome to find that children in this country are not exercising as much as their peers in other countries, despite most of them saying that they like sports,” Chiu Ching-hui (邱靖惠), director of the foundation’s research and development division, told a news conference held in Taipei yesterday to release the results of a survey on children’s participation in sports in the country.
In Australia, elementary-school students spend 60 percent of their time after school exercising or playing sports, with the figure at 56 percent in Canada, 54 percent in France, 49 percent in the UK, 44 percent in the US, but only 29 percent in Taiwan, she said.
Photo: Wang Min-wei, Taipei Times
“However, 91.7 percent of the more than 1,000 fourth and fifth graders that responded to our survey said they like sports, 97.2 percent said they think exercising is important and 90.7 percent said they would like to have longer PE classes,” Chiu said. “Hence, there must be some problems that explain why children are interested in sports, but they are not exercising enough.”
When asked to explain why they do not exercise, 35 percent of the respondents said they cannot find a suitable place to exercise, while 33 percent said they do not have the required equipment and 19 percent said that the sports facilities available to them are not in good condition.
When asked about the PE classes offered at their school, most of the respondents complained that the class is uninteresting because it is repetitive.
“As many as 45.8 percent of the respondents said that the teacher repeatedly asks them to do the same activity, while 39 percent said that they have less than three activities per class,” Chiu said. “Yet what’s most worrisome is that 22.6 percent of the respondents said that their PE teacher is not present during class.”
Lack of facilities and inspiring educators are some of the reasons behind children’s lack of participation in sports, Chiu said.
However, an elementary-school student called Chan-yuan (瞻遠), on the other hand, said that a high percentage of respondents may have said that they like sports because they like to read comics related to sports.
“They read those comics and think it’s cool to be an athlete, so they think they like sports,” Chan-yuan said. “But in fact, they are often just too lazy to exercise properly.”
However, Chan-yuan did agree that PE class is boring.
“I think it may be better for students to choose which sport they want to do so that they may attend classes according to their own preferences,” she said.
The US-Japan joint statement released on Friday not mentioning the “one China” policy might be a sign that US President Donald Trump intends to decouple US-China relations from Taiwan, a Taiwanese academic said. Following Trump’s meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on Friday, the US and Japan issued a joint statement where they reaffirmed the importance of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and support for Taiwan’s meaningful participation in international organizations. Trump has not personally brought up the “one China” policy in more than a year, National Taiwan University Department of Political Science Associate Professor Chen Shih-min (陳世民)
‘NEVER!’ Taiwan FactCheck Center said it had only received donations from the Open Society Foundations, which supports nonprofits that promote democratic values Taiwan FactCheck Center (TFC) has never received any donation from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a cofounder of the organization wrote on his Facebook page on Sunday. The Taipei-based organization was established in 2018 by Taiwan Media Watch Foundation and the Association of Quality Journalism to monitor and verify news and information accuracy. It was officially registered as a foundation in 2021. National Chung Cheng University communications professor Lo Shih-hung (羅世宏), a cofounder and chairman of TFC, was responding to online rumors that the TFC receives funding from the US government’s humanitarian assistance agency via the Open Society Foundations (OSF),
ANNUAL LIGHT SHOW: The lanterns are exhibited near Taoyuan’s high-speed rail station and around the Taoyuan Sports Park Station of the airport MRT line More than 400 lanterns are to be on display at the annual Taiwan Lantern Festival, which officially starts in Taoyuan today. The city is hosting the festival for the second time — the first time was in 2016. The Tourism Administration held a rehearsal of the festival last night. Chunghwa Telecom donated the main lantern of the festival to the Taoyuan City Government. The lanterns are exhibited in two main areas: near the high-speed rail (HSR) station in Taoyuan, which is at the A18 station of the Taoyuan Airport MRT, and around the Taoyuan Sports Park Station of the MRT
An alleged US government plan to encourage Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) to form a joint venture with Intel to boost US chipmaking would place the Taiwanese foundry giant in a more disadvantageous position than proposed tariffs on imported chips, a semiconductor expert said yesterday. If TSMC forms a joint venture with its US rival, it faces the risk of technology outflow, said Liu Pei-chen (劉佩真), a researcher at the Taiwan Industry Economics Database of the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research. A report by international financial services firm Baird said that Asia semiconductor supply chain talks suggest that the US government would