Opposition lawmakers, academics and others are up in arms about the Ministry of Education’s proposal to give high school students more class time on Chinese history.
Perhaps they remember George Orwell’s warning in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
The ministry’s task force has proposed that high schoolers — over the course of their first two years of school — have one semester of Taiwanese history and one-and-a-half semesters each of Chinese history and world history. The extra half-a-semester for Chinese history would be taken from the two semesters of world history now required.
The idea, officials have said, was to give students a better “understanding of their own cultural roots.”
Amid the complaints that the proposed changes were a step toward the resinification of the curriculum was criticism that the curriculum was just overhauled five years ago. While much of the debate over the revisions, then and now, has been bogged down by the political divide that colors so much of everyday life in Taiwan, it is important to remember that the changes five years ago were an attempt to inject some reality into history textbooks — as opposed to Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) mythology — as well as give students a Taiwan-centric viewpoint.
As historian and then-minister of education Tu Cheng-sheng (杜正勝) said, the curriculum was to “have its base in Taiwan, concern China and have a foot in the international arena.”
Those revisions eliminated the fairytale stories of Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) and Sun Yat-sen’s (孫中山) childhoods that had more in common with George Washington’s chopping down the cherry tree than real life, provided a realistic map and historical timeline of the Republic of China and its rule over Taiwan and included information about major events such as the 228 Incident.
Problems with the dichotomy that exists between history textbooks and fact are nothing new, nor are they unique to Taiwan. The textbooks used in today’s US high schools are far different than those used in the 1960s, for example, in their treatment of Native American history and racial inequality. And think of the uproar over Japan’s repeated whitewashing of its World War II-era history.
However, the debate in Taiwan over what should be taught in history and civics classes should not be confined to the Taiwan-China divide. Losing half a semester from world history is something students cannot afford, judging from some of the public relations disasters in recent years that have highlighted an appalling ignorance of world history.
Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich have been the greatest beneficiaries of this glossing over of world history, given the regularity with which the fuehrer has popped up in ads in recent years. In 1999, the local trading company promoting German-made DBK space heaters thought a cartoon Hitler would be a good advertising icon, while just two years later the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) raised eyebrows by choosing to feature Hitler, former Cuban president Fidel Castro, former US president John Kennedy and former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) in what was supposed to be a quirky, humorous TV campaign ad as examples of bold and courageous leaders. And who can — or should — forget The Jail, the Taipei restaurant whose cell-like booths were decorated with pictures from Alcatraz and other US prisons as well as Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz.
The losers in this cyclical power-struggle over history, however, are the students, who end up knowing too little about too many things. The only winners are the textbook publishers who get the contracts to produce the new materials.
For as Dutch historian Pieter Geyl said: “History is an argument without end.”
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