A protest is scheduled for the Yilan County Municipal Zhongshan Elementary School founding anniversary event on May 28 to pressure the administration into shedding the reference to Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) in its name, organizers said.
Founded in 1896, Zhongshan Elementary is the county’s oldest elementary school, and its name has been changed three times. First established as Yilan National Language Learning Institute, the school’s name was changed to Yilan Public School in 1933 and Yilan City Asahi School in 1941.
The last name change in 1946, after the arrival of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government, took its name to honor Sun’s nom de guerre, Zhongshan (中山).
Photo: Chiang Chih-hsiung, Taipei Times
Activists from the Internet-based Taiwan Education Transitional Justice Alliance said that the name should be changed because Sun had little to do with the school, while democracy pioneers Chiang Wei-shui (蔣渭水) and Kuo Yu-hsin (郭雨新) were among its alumni.
The alliance said the name is “the ghost of the KMT’s party-state,” and that it would initiate a flash mob protest and stage performances at the event marking the school’s 120th anniversary.
The campaign is called “Welcome back Yu-hsin [Kuo], goodbye Zhongshan [Sun]” in honor of the 100th anniversary of Kuo’s enrollment in the school, the alliance said.
Alliance convener Chang Wen-lung (張文隆) called on Yilan’s educators to lead the nation in implementing transitional justice, asking: “What was Sun doing when Zhongshan Elementary School was founded? What did one have to do with the other?”
The alliance does not propose a new name for the school and believes that the issue should be decided after a public consensus, Chang said.
In response, the school’s principal, Chen Min-chen (陳敏貞), said there are 29 public schools in the nation named after Sun, and there were “historical reasons” for its renaming in 1946.
Her leadership at the school focuses on providing “quality education” and she does not consider the name of the school “important,” Chen said, adding that many alumni take pride in Zhongshan Elementary and she would leave it up to public opinion to decide the necessity of changing its name.
The Ministry of Education said that out of the 2,661 elementary schools in Taiwan, 18 are named after Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and 16 are named after Sun. Taiwan has 760 high schools of which seven are named after Chiang and six are named after Sun.
There are no fixed procedures for renaming a public school, unless changes had been made to its administrative level, type classification its affiliation with to a local government, and in those cases the school must submit its new name to the authorities for approval, Deputy Minister of Education Lin Teng-chiao (林騰蛟) said.
The authority for renaming an elementary school or a high school rests with the city or county government to which it is affiliated, but it is also important for proponents to wait for community consensus, as attempts by local governments to make changes to the names of public schools have on occasion been thwarted by resistance from the community, Lin said.
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