World Sight Day was on Thursday last week. The WHO in 1998 set its sights on raising awareness of eye health, designating the second Thursday of October every year as the date, working alongside several international organizations to expand healthcare guarantees for vision, and promoting activities for benefits in medical health areas.
This year’s theme was a call to urge the world to give greater concern to the importance of eyesight health in children, and to encourage children across the world to cherish and protect their vision.
Protecting children’s “windows into the soul” is not just a “nice to have” healthcare and welfare measure. The concept can be traced back to the obligations of countries codified in the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article 24 of the convention explicitly spells out guarantees for children’s right to healthcare. The government should invest in ensuring that all children can enjoy rights to healthcare services, and not deprive them of their rights.
To further strengthen this concept, the Constitutional Court wrote in Interpretation No. 785 that the legislature also guarantees the public’s right to health, including comprehensive mental and physical health. These guarantees are not to be intentionally infringed upon. In light of this, the government has an obligation to look after public welfare, and fulfill guarantees that meet the most basic threshold of rights to healthcare.
Since 2002, the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the Ministry of Education have worked together to promote a health advancement plan for schools. Under the plan’s framework, it would publicize and promote vision health concepts to the public.
In view of the precipitous rise in the rate of myopia cases in elementary schools, the Examination Yuan in 2017 pinpointed the lack of effective response plans as the reason for the increase, and moved quickly to demand that concerned government agencies look into the problem and find a way forward.
Over the past few years, the education ministry’s K-12 Administration has continued with its “Key Code to Eye Health: 3010120” vision protection program. This program recommends resting one’s eyes for 10 minutes for every 30 minutes of reading or concentrated use at close range, as well as outside physical recreation for upward of 120 minutes per day, as a means of promoting students’ vision.
The education ministry’s data show that the poor vision rate of first-grade students in 2021 was 28.13 percent, but sixth-grade students that same year had a rate of 63.38 percent. It would seem that the prevalence of myopia increases in tandem with students’ advancement to higher grade levels. In June this year, the rate of poor vision in students became so elevated it drew the attention of lawmakers, who passed a resolution requesting that the Ministry of Education research and propose a tangible plan to “improve present myopia conditions, as well as to boost student vision health.”
It would not be a detriment to pair vision healthcare with policies to promote outdoor recess and play. We should encourage teachers and instructors to move some of their lessons outdoors and examine whether schools have set aside any equipment or funding for outside play. Policies should also include the provision of ample time for students to have recess so we could ensure that they have enough time for outdoor activities. At the same time, we should be cautious about digital education policies and avoid using such platforms just for the sake of accumulating platform usage statistics.
For the moment, the education ministry has issued an “Items of Note for Digitized Equipment Use in Elementary School Education Settings.” As is the nature of administrative rules, they are not binding and need to be re-examined from a legal perspective to protect children’s right to healthcare.
Huang Chung-ming is a postdoctoral research fellow of the Graduate School of Culture and Education Law at National Taipei University of Education.
Translated by Tim Smith
RSS