The largest mass demonstration in Taiwan since the end of martial law in 1987 occurred on April 10, 1994. Thousands of parents and children joined the demonstration, which was organized by education reform groups with the theme of “walk for the next generation.” It was the first of its type in Taiwan and was lauded as a successful social movement.
I did not take part in the demonstration. On that day, a newspaper published an article I wrote in which I advised that any expansion of universities must take demographic trends into account, and that we should not blindly establish new universities or upgrade existing colleges to university status.
Rather, I said that the emphasis should be on developing the characteristics of institutions.
Obviously, my advice was drowned out by the tide of other demands, but nowadays everyone understands how important demographic factors are for the development of education.
Ironically, the narrative of education reform in those days mostly consisted of university professors citing examples from advanced countries to highlight the shortcomings of higher education in Taiwan.
The parents of that time mostly belonged to the post-World War II baby boom generation. In their days, Taiwan’s education resources were thin. Schools were big and classes were large, too. There was fierce competition for admission to senior-high schools and tertiary education.
By the 1990s, it was their children’s turn to be locked in fierce competition for entrance to senior-high schools and universities.
The number of schools and colleges in Taiwan had increased, but, as well as having to take the Joint College Entrance Examination, having so many people applying to university meant that each applicant’s chance of gaining admission was slim.
The demonstration’s calls for “widely establishing high schools and universities” and “small schools with small class sizes,” which were promoted by a group of university professors who had studied abroad, appealed to the boomer generation who were vying to get the best for their children.
Even then, I observed that the number of births each year in the 1990s was about 100,000 fewer than the yearly number of students who took high school and university entrance exams. This was at a time when the students were born between 1976 and 1980.
One of the main demands of the demonstration was to widely establish senior-high schools and universities, but that long-term goal could not solve the problem of the number of students who were vying for university entrance. It could only help those who were born during and after the 1990s, when the birthrate was falling and would continue to fall.
In view of these concerns, I declined the education reform groups’ invitation to take part in the demonstration and instead submitted an article that was somewhat at odds with the reformers’ demands.
Soon after the 1994 demonstration, the Executive Yuan set up a Cabinet commission on education reform whose convener was then-Academia Sinica president Lee Yuan-tseh (李遠哲).
I had the good fortune to take part in the commission and express my opinions, but my suggestions did not receive much attention.
The commission’s General Report on Education Reform (教育改革總諮議報告書), published in 1996, took no account of the population factor. Instead, expansion of higher education galloped ahead like a runaway horse, with particularly fast expansion in the fields of humanities and social sciences.
By the start of the 21st century, net enrollment rates at institutes of higher education in Taiwan reached 50 percent, but universities continued to expand. I therefore submitted articles to newspapers that were no longer just advice, but more critique.
I said that expanding universities was the wrong way to go, and that the essential tasks were to avoid the reproduction of class inequality and reduce the gap between urban and rural areas.
Then came 2006, the first year in which some Taiwanese universities could not recruit enough students to fill the available places. When that happened, the Ministry of Education finally called a halt to university expansion, but it was too late to stop graduates from becoming the group with the highest rate of unemployment.
In 2003, the Alliance for Educational Restructuring led by professor Hwang Kwang-kuo (黃光國) produced a 10,000-character letter about the chaotic state of education reform. As well as joining the alliance, I published a book called 10 Years of Education Reform: Building Dreams for Whom? (十年教改為誰築夢?), in which I analyzed demographic trends and deduced from them that the expansion of higher education was leading to a crisis.
Now, 29 years after the 1994 demonstration, a vast majority of young people enter university, and the proportion of Taiwan’s population who have studied at universities and colleges is among the highest in the world.
I wonder how much more competitive Taiwan has become as a result.
However, universities and colleges are closing one after another. The original policy of widely establishing senior-high schools and universities has become a hot potato for the government, and no effective way has yet been found to curb the collapse of the education sector.
Looking back over the history of this social movement, the call to expand education arose from good intentions for the next generation, in the hope of breaking through the bottleneck of admissions to senior-high schools and universities.
Was there anything wrong with the calls for reform? In my view, the key point is people’s tendency to project their own experiences onto their offspring in the hope that the young people do not repeat their mistakes.
In doing so, parents believe that good intentions enable them to do something positive for the next generation.
In my book, I proposed the concept of the anachronistic projection, by which parents were, with the best of intentions, projecting their own study experiences onto their children. In the belief that they were “reforming” the system, they were really exorcising their own preoccupations.
You can hardly blame parents for having certain ideas, but when it came to policy, we should have been more cautious. Apart from comparing ourselves with advanced countries, we should have also taken account of our own country’s demographic trends.
An ironic question to ask is: How many politicians nowadays think they are duty-bound to “disenchant” the public, without realizing that they themselves are stuck in the nightmares of the past? Could it be that these acts of “disenchantment” could actually become a nightmare for future generations?
James Hsueh is a retired National Taiwan University professor.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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