President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Premier Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) should make public their stances on the controversial “fine-tuning” of high-school curriculum guidelines, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said yesterday, criticizing what he called the Ma administration’s unwillingness to address the controversy.
“Because the curriculum guidelines have already caused so much controversy, the premier and the president should have made their stances clear long ago,” Ko said.
“The curriculum guidelines are their problem and it is their responsibility to resolve it,” Ko said. “Because the issue has not been properly addressed and the Ministry of Education did not deal with the student protests effectively, things got to the point where the police had to come in and clean up the mess.”
Photo: CNA
The adjustments to curriculum guidelines slated to go into effect on Aug. 1 have been controversial for an allegedly “China-centric” focus and “opaque” approval process.
Student activists and three reporters were arrested on Thursday for trespassing on ministry grounds during a protest against the changes.
Ko yesterday said that any decision on whether police officers would be disciplined for making the arrests would have to wait until the Taipei Police Department presented a full report.
Because of the police department’s vested interests, the report would be subject to a review by a city committee chaired by Taipei Deputy Mayor Teng Chia-chi (鄧家基), with the students and reporters involved invited to submit their views, he said.
Meanwhile, the ministry yesterday reiterated that it would continue to “cooperate” with the police investigation into the incident in accordance with the law.
Deputy Minister of Education Chen Der-hwa (陳德華) said that while the ministry would advise the public prosecutor to show leniency in cases where students were willing to apologize, there were no plans to drop charges.
He added that the students’ physical altercation with a ministry official who tried to prevent them from entering the building was subject to public prosecution.
Chen added that no decision had been made on whether or not to drop charges against the reporters who had been arrested with the students.
Separately yesterday, in a regular meeting at the Presidential Office building attended by Ma, Mao and Cabinet officials, Minister of Education Wu Se-hwa (吳思華) made a presentation on the planned adjustments to the curriculum guidelines, but made no mention of the ministry’s much-criticized handling of the protest.
Wu defended the procedures the ministry had followed in proposing the adjustments as he said that they were in accordance with established precedents.
The 17 debatable items in the new version of the curriculum guidelines were in line with historical facts and the Constitution, Wu added.
In response to demands that the decisionmaking process be made transparent, the ministry has publicized meeting minutes and the conclusions of the curriculum review committee, Wu said, adding that the ministry would stand by its decision not to disclose what each review committee member had said and voted for at the meetings.
Making the information public “could have serious repercussions for the operations of the administration branch” because it would mean that individuals sitting on many other committees commissioned by the ministry or other governmental agencies would also become subject to the requirement, Wu said.
‘LONE WOLF’: The suspect was difficult to locate, as he did not use a cellphone, did not contact family and often lived in abandoned sites or parks, police said Taipei police on Thursday morning arrested a man accused of numerous burglaries and at least 14 incidents of sexual assault spanning more than 20 years, in what might be the nation’s most notorious crime spree in recent years. Sixty-year-old Tu Ming-lang (涂明朗) — who was yesterday placed in judicial detention, after a judge determined he was a flight risk without a fixed address — faces multiple charges of sexual assault and burglary, police said. A task force comprised of various law enforcement agencies arrested Tu as part of an investigation into an April 28 burglary in Daan District (大安), in which a
Ninth graders were asked to define “trolling” on this year’s standardized exam, reflecting efforts to make the test better reflect real-life situations. Adjustments to this year’s Comprehensive Assessment Program for Junior High School Students were revealed on Sunday, after the last cohort of students completed the test over the weekend. The Ministry of Education solicited feedback about the test from teachers, who approved of the new question in the English portion. Not only was question No. 20 “very much in line with real-life situations,” but it also used a new style in which students were asked to ascertain the correct dictionary definition based
Taiwan is on alert for monkeypox, a rare viral disease that has caused 87 infections in 11 countries over the past three weeks, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Saturday. The WHO on Friday convened an emergency session to discuss a sudden outbreak of monkeypox in North America and Europe. Since the beginning of this month, 87 confirmed cases and 28 possible cases have been identified in 11 countries. The countries with the highest case counts are England with 29 cases, and Portugal and Spain with 23 each. Monkeypox is a viral zoonotic disease occurring primarily in the tropical rainforest areas
Three human skeletons and artifacts believed to be about 400 years old were unearthed by construction workers at National Ilan University in Yilan County, the university said yesterday. The discoveries were made on May 10 as workers were digging to expand the College of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science’s facilities, the university said in a statement. The skeletons were found at three sites, along with glass beads, copper bells and rings, discs and a fish-shaped metal knot, it said. The find is likely connected to the “Old Baili Village” (擺厘舊社, Bai Li Jiu She), an as-yet-undiscovered Kavalan settlement that has been mentioned in