The Transitional Justice Commission has said that it has succeeded in having content on state-perpetrated violence included in civic education curricula, which would allow students in primary and secondary schools to learn about transitional justice and its importance.
The 12-year National Education curricula for social science includes material on war, state-perpetrated violence, freedom, democracy and human rights, but not transitional justice, commission member Peng Jen-yu (彭仁郁) said.
With the help of the Ministry of Education, transitional justice has been added to the “human rights and civic education interim program” so that teachers would instruct students about transitional justice and include it as a metric for evaluating teachers’ performance, Peng said.
As transitional justice is a relatively new issue for Taiwanese, few teachers have the skills needed to teach it, she said.
Instruction on how to teach the topic has been added to teacher education programs, she said, adding that the ministry gave the commission a list of teachers competent to teach the subject.
Some civic education teachers engaged in experimental education have gotten ahead of the curve, introducing students to the 228 Incident and the White Terror era, and having them view Vindication — a documentary on the nation’s authoritarian era — which show students how the government used to trample Taiwanese’s human rights while teaching them the importance of rule of law.
The Act on Promoting Transitional Justice (促進轉型正義條例) stipulates that retrials should be granted where rulings from the White Terror era contradict the Constitution, freedom and democracy, or the principle of fairness, she said.
The commission has summarized each case of injustice that it has redressed, she said, adding that the summaries could also be used as teaching materials.
“The first step is to identify the one who violated human rights, which was the [authoritarian] state,” Peng said.
Education under Taiwan’s authoritarian regime poisoned students so that many teachers have yet to fully grasp what pursuing transitional justice means, she said, adding that they have yet to acknowledge the atrocities.
Any means that an authoritarian government uses to consolidate its rule — such as arbitrarily convicting dissidents and sending them to re-education programs — is a travesty of democracy and a constitutional system, and teachers must recognize this truth before they can teach the topic, she said.
Established in 2018, the commission has found through its investigations at schools that teachers who instruct students about transitional justice — even decades after the nation’s democratization — have been suppressed by school administrators, received complaints from parents or been ostracized by their colleagues, she said.
The aim of transitional justice is not political one-upmanship, but the restoration of historical facts, she said.
FINAL COUNTDOWN: About 50,000 attended a pro-recall rally yesterday, while the KMT and the TPP plan to rally against the recall votes today Democracy activists, together with arts and education representatives, yesterday organized a motorcade, while thousands gathered on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei in the evening in support of tomorrow’s recall votes. Recall votes for 24 Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers and suspended Hsinchu City mayor Ann Kao (高虹安) are to be held tomorrow, while recall votes for seven other KMT lawmakers are scheduled for Aug. 23. The afternoon motorcade was led by the Spring Breeze Culture and Arts Foundation, the Tyzen Hsiao Foundation and the Friends of Lee Teng-hui Association, and was joined by delegates from the Taiwan Statebuilding Party and the Taiwan Solidarity
Instead of threatening tariffs on Taiwan-made chips, the US should try to reinforce cooperation with Taiwan on semiconductor development to take on challenges from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a Taiwanese think tank said. The administration of US President Donald Trump has threatened to impose across-the-board import duties of 32 percent on Taiwan-made goods and levy a separate tariff on semiconductors, which Taiwan is hoping to avoid. The Research Institute for Democracy, Society, and Emerging Technology (DSET), a National Science and Technology Council think tank, said that US efforts should focus on containing China’s semiconductor rise rather than impairing Taiwan. “Without
An SOS message in a bottle has been found in Ireland that is believed to have come from the Taiwanese captain of fishing vessel Yong Yu Sing No. 18 (永裕興18號), who has been missing without a trace for over four years, along with nine Indonesian crew members. The vessel, registered to Suao (蘇澳), went missing near Hawaii on Dec. 30, 2020. The ship has since been recovered, but the 10 crew members have never been found. The captain, surnamed Lee (李), is believed to have signed the note with his name. A post appeared on Reddit on Tuesday after a man
President William Lai (賴清德) today condemned an alleged attempt by two Chinese to snatch a letter of congratulations handed to Taiwan’s taekwondo team after they won silver at the Summer World University Games in Essen, Germany, yesterday. A Chinese man and woman reportedly tried to snatch a congratulatory letter to athletes Hung Jiun-yi (洪俊義), Jung Jiun-jie (鍾俊傑) and Huang Cho-cheng (黃卓乘) from the Ministry of Education, and then argued with media employees. “Why are you taking our things?” the media employees asked. “Does that say Chinese Taipei?” the two Chinese reportedly said. Following the incident, Sports Administration Director-General Cheng Shih-chung (鄭世忠) wrote on
RSS