Several media outlets reported recently that the International Mind Research Institute in Tainan had been teaching underperforming schoolchildren to eat fire, walk on broken glass and break wooden boards with their bare hands to “conquer their fear,” claiming that this was all they needed for an improvement in school performance.
The institute certainly has legal issues to deal with, but we would like to discuss why parents would pay big money to put their children through such suffering. A closer look at the issue suggests that the problem lies in credentialism, or undue emphasis on degrees and other credentials.
News reports frequently state that parents have great expectations for their children. Is this really a good thing if the parents’ ambitions are realized at the cost of a child’s physical and mental well-being? Are the children being sacrificed to fulfill their parents’ dreams? Where do children’s rights belong in all of this?
These questions point to a conflict between the parental right to educate children and a child’s right to unrestricted character development.
Article 1084 of the Civil Code states: “Parents have the right and duty to protect, educate, and maintain their minor children.”
These are parental rights as stated in the law, and they are based on the view that parents are caregivers most suited to the development of their children. It cannot be denied that the scope of parental rights is extremely wide, and these include the right to educate.
However, these rights are not a goal. They are a means to guaranteeing a child’s self-fulfillment. In other words, the parents’ goal as their children’s guardians should be to promote character development, and not to force children into becoming the kind of people their parents would rather them be.
In the Tainan incident, the parents had sent their children to “potential development courses” to improve their academic performance. Their performance, however, did not improve. Instead, they were sent to the hospital with burns and muscle injuries, and in some cases had to receive psychiatric help. In this case, the exercise of parental rights became an obstacle to character development, and credentialism was the culprit.
The goal of education is to ensure opportunities for self-realization. This goal has been distorted by credentialism, the best example of which is cram-school education. More specifically, the pursuit of fairness in student assessment has resulted in uniformity in exams, creating a pursuit for advanced diplomas and unrealistic attempts to enter Ivy League schools. As time passed, education shifted from serving student self-realization to becoming a tool catering to high achievers. This decline in the role of education is most regrettable.
Education, rather than credentialism, is the mechanism that facilitates social mobility. Unfortunately, Taiwan’s educational system has long been under the influence of credentialism and managerialism, with the result that advancement to higher education is treated as a space for uniform educational management, closely integrating credentialism with job obtainment and evaluation of “social accomplishments.”
That being so, the parental view of the usefulness of credentialism is likely to enter into a child’s thinking at an early stage, thus affecting the direction of his or her studies. This will further strengthen the child’s competitiveness, leading in some cases to cutthroat competition.
The result? Childhood, which should be colored by the joy of development, instead becomes a miserable memory that is too painful to look back on.
How long will it take for Taiwanese children to escape the cage of credentialism? And how long will it take for Taiwan to abandon the view that “being a scholar is to be on top of the world”?
If parents evaluate children using scores rather than a broader understanding of the individual child, then the children may come to believe that as long as they get good scores, anything goes. When these children grow up as selfish individuals who care only about their private concerns, what will their parents have to complain about if they are ignored in their old age?
Poisoned by credentialism, the childhood of our children has been distorted, and Taiwan has become a place where everyone pursues selfish interests.
We must create the necessary space to implement a long-proposed 12-year compulsory education system to let students enter senior high school based on district. This will prevent the seeds of future social conflict from being planted. The government should give the public hope for the education of their children.
Hsu Yue-dian is a professor in the Department of Law at National Cheng Kung University; Chen Be-yu is a doctoral student in the department.
TRANSLATED BY EDDY CHANG
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