Academia Sinica researchers underlined students’ ability to resist political manipulation and think independently amid allegations that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is behind the recent high-school student-led protests against the Ministry of Education’s controversial adjustments to high-school curriculum guidelines.
The allegation was brought up again on Friday by Shih Hsin University professor and convener of the ministry’s curriculum adjustment task force Wang Hsiao-po (王曉波), one day after the death of student activist Dai Lin (林冠華), who allegedly committed suicide on Thursday to protest against the ministry’s adjustments.
Academia Sinica researcher Chang Mao-kuei (張茂桂) said that information is becoming more accessible to students today, which helps to raise a high political awareness among young people.
“It is gratuitous to assume that students are politically naive or purely innocent. Young people are more mature than the public imagines, while they are indeed inexperienced in handling sensitive political issues, which nevertheless makes them bolder than adults and more prone to clashing with the establishment,” he said.
He said that student activists are often hamstrung by their parents and teachers, who tend to snuff out student activism under the pretext that students should not do anything that is out of their duty, which Chang said is an attempt to belittle students’ intelligence and to turn a collective campaign into a single, irregular case.
“Young people have to bear the consequences of what adults are incapable of settling and are forced into conflict with the system. It is a typical example of generational injustice,” Chang said.
Academia Sinica researcher Liang Kuo-kan (梁國淦) said the news of Lin’s death gripped him especially, as he was giving a speech on how participating in social movements can affect a person’s physical and metal health at a forum organized by students at National Taichung First Senior High School the day prior to Lin’s death.
“Student activists might feel alienated from their family, peers and teachers, whose support for student movements does not come easily,” Liang said, adding that he should have been talking with student activists on the streets earlier to ease their tension.
Liang echoed Chang’s words, saying that young people nowadays cannot be easily manipulated and they do not take protests to the streets unless they feel a real need to do so.
“It is a thought-provoking issue for the public to envision how high-school students, who have no right to vote, could express their anger and dissatisfaction,” he said.
Chang said the ministry is acting against the spirit of education by threatening to press charges against students who were arrested for entering the ministry’s Taipei headquarters on July 23 in protest of the curriculum adjustments, and also by using education to consolidate the authority’s governance.
“The ministry is treating student activists as delinquents by promising to withdraw charges against those who ‘show remorse’ for breaking into the ministry headquarters,” Chang said.
“Education does not serve political ends, nor could cramming students with what curriculum dictates solve sensitive political problems,” he said.
“Education should help students acquire knowledge and develop the ability to deal with politics instead,” Chang said, while calling on the ministry to revoke the curriculum adjustments and return education to its true nature.
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