The Transitional Justice Commission has said that it has succeeded in having content on state-perpetrated violence included in civic education curricula, which would allow students in primary and secondary schools to learn about transitional justice and its importance.
The 12-year National Education curricula for social science includes material on war, state-perpetrated violence, freedom, democracy and human rights, but not transitional justice, commission member Peng Jen-yu (彭仁郁) said.
With the help of the Ministry of Education, transitional justice has been added to the “human rights and civic education interim program” so that teachers would instruct students about transitional justice and include it as a metric for evaluating teachers’ performance, Peng said.
As transitional justice is a relatively new issue for Taiwanese, few teachers have the skills needed to teach it, she said.
Instruction on how to teach the topic has been added to teacher education programs, she said, adding that the ministry gave the commission a list of teachers competent to teach the subject.
Some civic education teachers engaged in experimental education have gotten ahead of the curve, introducing students to the 228 Incident and the White Terror era, and having them view Vindication — a documentary on the nation’s authoritarian era — which show students how the government used to trample Taiwanese’s human rights while teaching them the importance of rule of law.
The Act on Promoting Transitional Justice (促進轉型正義條例) stipulates that retrials should be granted where rulings from the White Terror era contradict the Constitution, freedom and democracy, or the principle of fairness, she said.
The commission has summarized each case of injustice that it has redressed, she said, adding that the summaries could also be used as teaching materials.
“The first step is to identify the one who violated human rights, which was the [authoritarian] state,” Peng said.
Education under Taiwan’s authoritarian regime poisoned students so that many teachers have yet to fully grasp what pursuing transitional justice means, she said, adding that they have yet to acknowledge the atrocities.
Any means that an authoritarian government uses to consolidate its rule — such as arbitrarily convicting dissidents and sending them to re-education programs — is a travesty of democracy and a constitutional system, and teachers must recognize this truth before they can teach the topic, she said.
Established in 2018, the commission has found through its investigations at schools that teachers who instruct students about transitional justice — even decades after the nation’s democratization — have been suppressed by school administrators, received complaints from parents or been ostracized by their colleagues, she said.
The aim of transitional justice is not political one-upmanship, but the restoration of historical facts, she said.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) today condemned the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after the Czech officials confirmed that Chinese agents had surveilled Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) during her visit to Prague in March last year. Czech Military Intelligence director Petr Bartovsky yesterday said that Chinese operatives had attempted to create the conditions to carry out a demonstrative incident involving Hsiao, going as far as to plan a collision with her car. Hsiao was vice president-elect at the time. The MAC said that it has requested an explanation and demanded a public apology from Beijing. The CCP has repeatedly ignored the desires
Many Chinese spouses required to submit proof of having renounced their Chinese household registration have either completed the process or provided affidavits ahead of the June 30 deadline, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. Of the 12,146 people required to submit the proof, 5,534 had done so as of Wednesday, MAC deputy head and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said. Another 2,572 people who met conditions for exemption or deferral from submitting proof of deregistration — such as those with serious illnesses or injuries — have submitted affidavits instead, he said. “As long as individuals are willing to cooperate with the legal
The Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant’s license has expired and it cannot simply be restarted, the Executive Yuan said today, ahead of national debates on the nuclear power referendum. The No. 2 reactor at the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant in Pingtung County was disconnected from the nation’s power grid and completely shut down on May 17, the day its license expired. The government would prioritize people’s safety and conduct necessary evaluations and checks if there is a need to extend the service life of the reactor, Executive Yuan spokeswoman Michelle Lee (李慧芝) told a news conference. Lee said that the referendum would read: “Do
The Ministry of Environment yesterday held a seminar in Taipei for experts from Taiwan and Japan to exchange their experiences on the designs and development of public toilets. Japan Toilet Association chairman Kohei Yamamoto said that he was impressed with the eco-toilet set up at Daan Forest Park, adding that Japan still faces issues regarding public restrooms despite the progress it made over the past decades. For example, an all-gender toilet was set up in Kabukicho in Tokyo’s Shinjuku District several years ago, but it caused a public backlash and was rebuilt into traditional men’s and women’s toilets, he said. Japan Toilet Association
RSS