Alleging that the Ministry of Education’s recent high-school curriculum revisions go against academic professionalism while also limiting students’ ability to think outside the box, a coalition of 16 groups said it is mulling further demonstrations to protest against the central government’s so-called “minor adjustments.”
The group issued the call after the ministry’s approval last month of the revised curriculum guidelines on Chinese literature and social sciences, which are scheduled to be implemented at the start of the new school year in September next year. Among the changes are calling Japan’s 50-year rule of Taiwan the “Japanese colonial period” and referring to “China” as “Mainland China” in textbooks.
The “minor adjustments” were actually major changes that will result in prohibitions and regulations everywhere, according to the coalition, which included the National Federation of Teachers Union, the Civic and Law-related Education Foundation, the Union of Taiwanese Teachers and the Civic Educator’s Alliance.
The group said the curriculum guidelines concerning the Taiwanese history portion underwent sweeping changes, affecting more than 36.4 percent of it. The subject’s fourth chapter was 56 percent longer, and much of the content was either erroneous or biased because amateurs spearheaded the changes, rather than experts.
The Martial Law era under the former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime was “prettied up” as the main driver of Taiwan’s democracy, and the White Terror was linked to post-war anti-communist policies, the coalition said.
“The changes were made with no regards to the controversial nature of the cases over the course of four decades of the Martial Law era,” the coalition said, describing it as an effort to establish credibility for an autocratic regime that stifled dissent under the guise of fighting communism.
As for the curriculum guidelines on civic education, the coalition said the revisions removed the necessary space to debate issues of national identity, national power, tyranny of the majority and the White Terror by enforcing the values of traditional “Zhonghua culture” (中華文化).
The coalition added that the revisions completely disregard the emphasis on being accepting to multiculturalism in the fourth Constitutional amendment in 1997, and creates the problem of overlapping courses and the uneven distribution of course weighting.
The increase of three classes of classical Chinese literature in Mandarin Chinese courses was another attempt to exert Zhonghua influence over students, the group added.
It is an underhanded way of increasing the proportion of ancient Chinese taught to students and the revision prevents Taiwanese high-school students from reading works written in the modern style, it said.
National Federation of Teachers Union vice president Wu Chung-tai (吳忠泰) said education was a serious matter as it shaped the next generations.
“The Ministry of Education is misusing its authority to change class curricula, not to mention the allegedly illegal procedures and questionable content changes,” Wu said, adding that the coalition was in the midst of planning protests against the changes.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Cheng Li-chun (鄭麗君) said the high-school curricula were — by law — legally binding orders [from the ministry to the schools] and should not be considered “internal rules” that could be decided by the ministry alone.
The Legislative Yuan would seek to abolish the legislation on which the ministry based its powers to change curricula, Cheng said, adding that the legislature would also push for education that did not “brainwash” the students.
The ministry, in its latest response, reiterated its emphasis that all changes have proceeded in accordance with regulations and that changes made put the materials closer to historical fact, adding that questions raised were “mistaken conceptions” of the changes.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it is fully aware of the situation following reports that the son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has arrived in Taiwan and is to marry a Taiwanese. Local media reported that Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), son of the former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is to marry the granddaughter of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital founder Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政). The pair met when studying abroad and arranged to get married this year, with the wedding breakfast to be held at The One holiday resort in Hsinchu
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
‘SIGN OF DANGER’: Beijing has never directly named Taiwanese leaders before, so China is saying that its actions are aimed at the DPP, a foundation official said National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) yesterday accused Beijing of spreading propaganda, saying that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had singled out President William Lai (賴清德) in his meeting with US President Joe Biden when talking about those whose “true nature” seek Taiwanese independence. The Biden-Xi meeting took place on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Peru on Saturday. “If the US cares about maintaining peace across the Taiwan Strait, it is crucial that it sees clearly the true nature of Lai and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in seeking Taiwanese independence, handles the Taiwan question with extra
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
RSS