Teachers should be able to cultivate critical thinking in students not by expressing sympathy toward a particular political party or leader, but by offering objective observations.
Just before the presidential election, I asked my adult students if they would vote in the referendum. They said that a famous media celebrity advocated not casting referendum ballots and that they would follow what she had said, seem-ingly without understanding the reasons why.
Students seem to be so uncritical and easily influenced by how they are brought up, or simply because they believe authoritarian voices with whom they identify.
I was stunned when a 20-year-old student, who had just voted for the first time, asked me if I, in my mid-30s, had experienced the February 28 Incident.
Other older students did not know when this incident happened either. Ignorance of our own history and current events still appears to be prevalent among today's youngsters.
Looking back to my school days, I experienced a time when martial law was still in force, preventing us from publicly articulating our opinions or political inclinations.
For a long time, "political issues" were considered taboo topics for discussion in the classroom. Our exam-driven curriculum and its emphasis on rote memorization prevented us from thinking critically.
Paulo Freire, an advocate of pedagogy for the oppressed, insisted on promoting rationality in the teaching process via critical thinking and problem-solving to develop personal awareness in thinking.
This may sound radical to Taiwanese teachers, but the classroom is a place where we should cultivate independent thought. We teachers and students have been silenced because of our culture and old rhetorical systems.
To develop the ability to think critically in the classroom, I adopt doubt, belief and two-way dialogue as advocated by Peter Elbow. I distinguish between verified facts and rumors or media speculation to demonstrate how this dialectical dialogue can encourage students to think from different perspectives.
For example, from March 19 on, rumors quickly spread among the public that the pan-green camp staged the shooting of President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) in order to deliver more votes and win the election.
Given the sarcastic tone of the public figures who hinted the shooting was faked, we should be skeptical of their demands that Chen acquit himself with evidence of his innocence, and instead judge the appropriateness of their statements. We should then provide counterarguments to their claims.
The pan-blue camp's line of reasoning was not based on "reasonable doubt," but instead on questioning everything that Chen did.
The reasons for this "reasonable doubt" needed to be verified, but instead, without any evidence, half of the general public became skeptical about the circumstances of the shooting.
The more often politicians expressed suspicion over the shooting, the more likely the general public was to believe them. After the blue camp requested that a prominent forensics expert, Henry Lee (李昌鈺), come to Taiwan to assist the investigation, the bullets were determined to be real and the shooting verified. Our society therefore wasted a huge amount of resources verifying the shooting's authenticity.
We tend to watch news without critically analyzing the information we receive, simply believing instead whatever public figures claim.
Media representations offer a powerful tool to affect the way the public perceives and judges. If teachers cannot encourage students to think critically from a dialectical perspective, it is inevitable that the truth as they understand it will be distorted by blind trust in the media.
If we love Taiwan, we must teach our next generation well and provide them with a more democratic environment.
The ability to think critically must not be neglected. Political issues are not taboo issues, but prime material for training children to acquire this ability.
Florence Chiu
Pingtung
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
RSS