The newly elected Legislative Yuan should demand that the Ministry of Education withdraws its controversial amendments to high-school curriculum guidelines and stop deliberations on new guidelines, a group of students said yesterday.
About 10 students gathered outside the Legislative Yuan, brandishing copies of different legislators’ campaign promises, to demand that the legislature take action immediately after its first session opens on Monday.
“Now is the time for legislators to demonstrate their sincerity,” student representative Liao Hao-hsiang (廖浩翔) said. “We call on the new legislature to pass a resolution requiring the ministry to withdraw the controversial ‘adjusted’ guidelines and publicize the members and meeting records of the drafting committee.”
Activists stormed and occupied the Ministry of Education’s courtyard last year to protest the proposed adjustments, which they said contained China-centric changes passed through an opaque drafting and approval process.
Liao said that consideration of a new set of guidelines, part of the ministry’s plans to implement mandatory 12-year education, should be put on hold until a new law is passed to reform the drafting process.
“Using the current process to draft guidelines would be like washing your hands with dirty water, there is no way the result would be clean,” representative Shen Yi-hsien (沈宜嫻) said.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Cheng Li-chun (鄭麗君) and New Power Party legislators-elect Freddie Lim (林昶佐) and Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) joined the students, promising to sponsor legislation to force the withdrawal of the guideline changes and reforming the approval process to allow greater civil participation.
They also called for a simplification of the guidelines and the dropping of requirements that all textbooks receive ministry approval.
“We have already democratized, so there is no need for the government to draft such rigorous and detailed guidelines to limit how people can think,” Cheng said.
“Even though there are curriculum guidelines, we should still respect publishers’ freedom,” she said.
There are 77 incidents of Taiwanese travelers going missing in China between January last year and last month, the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) said. More than 40 remain unreachable, SEF Secretary-General Luo Wen-jia (羅文嘉) said on Friday. Most of the reachable people in the more than 30 other incidents were allegedly involved in fraud, while some had disappeared for personal reasons, Luo said. One of these people is Kuo Yu-hsuan (郭宇軒), a 22-year-old Taiwanese man from Kaohsiung who went missing while visiting China in August. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office last month said in a news statement that he was under investigation
‘JOINT SWORD’: Whatever President Lai says in his Double Ten speech, China would use it as a pretext to launch ‘punishment’ drills for his ‘separatist’ views, an official said China is likely to launch military drills this week near Taiwan, using President William Lai’s (賴清德) upcoming national day speech as a pretext to pressure the nation to accept its sovereignty claims, Taiwanese officials said. China in May launched “punishment” drills around Taiwan shortly after Lai’s inauguration, in what Beijing said was a response to “separatist acts,” sending heavily armed warplanes and staging mock attacks as state media denounced newly inaugurated Lai. The May drills were dubbed “Joint Sword — 2024A” and drew concerns from capitals, including Washington. Lai is to deliver a key speech on Thursday in front of the Presidential Office
An aviation jacket patch showing a Formosan black bear punching Winnie the Pooh has become popular overseas, including at an aviation festival held by the Japan Air Self-Defense Force at the Ashiya Airbase yesterday. The patch was designed last year by Taiwanese designer Hsu Fu-yu (徐福佑), who said that it was inspired by Taiwan’s countermeasures against frequent Chinese military aircraft incursions. The badge shows a Formosan black bear holding a Republic of China flag as it punches Winnie the Pooh — a reference to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — who is dressed in red and is holding a honey pot with
Taiwan was listed in 14th place among the world's wealthiest country in terms of GDP per capita, in the latest rankings released on Monday by Forbes magazine. Taiwan's GDP per capita was US$76,860, which put it at No. 14 on the list of the World's 100 Richest Countries this year, one spot above Hong Kong with US$75,130. The magazine's list of the richest countries in the world is compiled based on GDP per capita data, as estimated by the IMF. However, for a more precise measure of a nation's wealth, the magazine also considers purchasing power parity, which is a metric used to
RSS