In February, a student at Taichung Municipal Feng Yuan Senior High School killed himself, allegedly after long-term and collective bullying by school officials. Seven of those officials have been reassigned to another school by the Taichung Education Bureau, while the school’s director of student affairs was suspended.
Many consider the school’s investigation and report on the suicide a farce. First, it concluded that the school officials’ counseling and disciplining of the student did not constitute bullying. The report also included a questionable survey, in which five students were chosen from each class — but not from the class of the student who died — to answer whether the discipline was reasonable.
Misconduct by the student affairs director should have been considered a serious matter, but he only received a demerit from the school.
The bureau said that the report and the punishment for the school officials were unacceptable and inappropriate.
On Friday, a professional review committee was organized to review the report and the actions of the student affairs director. It determined that the conduct of the director contravened Article 18 of the Teachers’ Act (教師法) and they should be penalized in accordance with the regulation.
The committee said the director should receive a one-year suspension.
However, the Humanistic Education Foundation said that a suspension was insufficient. After a year, the director would be able to return to the school without facing any supervision or assessment.
Dismissal of the director would be a more appropriate way to handle the issue, as they would then have to compete with other candidates when seeking a new teaching position, and pass a screening process before they could be hired.
What is more perplexing is that the school’s report confirmed that “improper discipline” had occurred, but that the student had not been singled out. Therefore, the implication of the report is that students at Taichung Municipal Feng Yuan Senior High School are often subjected to demerits, body searches, intimidation, threats and discriminatory verbal abuse by school officials.
Even for a mentally mature adult with abundant social experience, this could be too much to handle. How would a high-school student be able to handle it? Does anyone believe the student killed himself simply out of the blue?
Moreover, on Thursday, Taichung Deputy Mayor Alicia Wang (王育敏) said that the city government would not accept the school’s report and demanded that it explain why the case was not considered bullying. Soon after, the school suspended the director for a year. This came as rapidly as thunder, and many wondered if the whole thing had been planned.
Under Article 3 of the Ministry of Education’s Regulations Governing Prevention and Control of Bullying on Campuses (校園霸凌防制準則), bullying is defined as any situation in which a person or group of people use speech, writing, images, signs, physical gestures, electronic communication or other means to directly or indirectly belittle, exclude, mistreat, harass or tease another person. The target of this harassment would be in a hostile and unfriendly environment, experiencing psychological, physical or financial harm, and could not safely study and participate in school activities.
What happened to the student at Taichung Municipal Feng Yuan Senior High School is extremely unfortunate. If the student’s suicide is considered unrelated to bullying, the ministry and other agencies should redefine “bullying.”
Chang Huey-por is a former president of National Changhua University of Education.
Translated by Emma Liu
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not