Tainan First Senior High School on Wednesday is to inaugurate its first political party, the TNFSH Full-Sugarism Party, to help support students’ democratic literacy.
Freshman Tsai Wei-po (蔡偉柏), a founding member of the new group, said the party was created to bring attention to student self-governance, and to supervise the administration and student association.
“One voice is easy to ignore,” Tsai was quoted as saying by the Chinese-language United Daily News on Friday. “A group has more influence.”
Photo: Liu Wan-chun, Taipei Times
The party has 33 members, but with more than 70 applications pending, out of a student population of 2,101, organizers said, adding that a chairperson and other officials would be appointed during Wednesday’s ceremony.
School principal Liao Tsai-ku (廖財固) on Saturday said the school respects students’ pursuit of democratic literacy and would provide positive guidance.
The TNFSH Full-Sugarism Party charter has seven main objectives, which range from serious to silly.
The party said it would seek to improve the welfare of the entire student body, construct a philosophy of equality within the school and advance students’ civic literacy.
It also intends to use memes to promote student self-governance, as well as the concept of “full sugarism.”
Referring to a well-known joke that Kaohsiung Senior High School (KSHS) governs southern Taiwan under the “Great KSHS Kingdom,” the TNFSH Full-Sugarism Party vowed to resist annexation by the school.
Lastly, the party promised to connect the all-boys school to Tainan Girls’ Senior High School through an underground tunnel.
The Senior High School Education Act (高級中等教育法) stipulates that schools must “guide students to organize self-governing organizations,” which means that students can establish self-governance organizations, but not many students know about this right, Tsai said.
The party founders decided that some humorous goals would help draw attention to the party and inspire other schools to create their own parties, Tsai added.
“Some people might think that we are just ‘kids playing at politics’ or that this has nothing to do with academics, but politics is a part of life,” the freshman said.
Students creating political parties should not be looked upon too seriously or negatively, he said.
Discussing such issues can help “implant democratic literacy in students,” Tsai added.
Although some people have joked that the new party would make the school a “one-party state,” Tsai said he backed the formation of other parties.
“It would give us a chance to analyze all kinds of issues,” he told the newspaper.
The Full-Sugarism Party is not the first student party in Taiwan.
The Taichung First Senior High School student council last year became the first in the nation to pass a “student political party act.”
Three parties were established, although one is at risk of dissolution after it failed to nominate any candidates for party office.
Police have issued warnings against traveling to Cambodia or Thailand when others have paid for the travel fare in light of increasing cases of teenagers, middle-aged and elderly people being tricked into traveling to these countries and then being held for ransom. Recounting their ordeal, one victim on Monday said she was asked by a friend to visit Thailand and help set up a bank account there, for which they would be paid NT$70,000 to NT$100,000 (US$2,136 to US$3,051). The victim said she had not found it strange that her friend was not coming along on the trip, adding that when she
TRAGEDY: An expert said that the incident was uncommon as the chance of a ground crew member being sucked into an IDF engine was ‘minuscule’ A master sergeant yesterday morning died after she was sucked into an engine during a routine inspection of a fighter jet at an air base in Taichung, the Air Force Command Headquarters said. The officer, surnamed Hu (胡), was conducting final landing checks at Ching Chuan Kang (清泉崗) Air Base when she was pulled into the jet’s engine for unknown reasons, the air force said in a news release. She was transported to a hospital for emergency treatment, but could not be revived, it said. The air force expressed its deepest sympathies over the incident, and vowed to work with authorities as they
A tourist who was struck and injured by a train in a scenic area of New Taipei City’s Pingsi District (平溪) on Monday might be fined for trespassing on the tracks, the Railway Police Bureau said yesterday. The New Taipei City Fire Department said it received a call at 4:37pm on Monday about an incident in Shifen (十分), a tourist destination on the Pingsi Railway Line. After arriving on the scene, paramedics treated a woman in her 30s for a 3cm to 5cm laceration on her head, the department said. She was taken to a hospital in Keelung, it said. Surveillance footage from a
INFRASTRUCTURE: Work on the second segment, from Kaohsiung to Pingtung, is expected to begin in 2028 and be completed by 2039, the railway bureau said Planned high-speed rail (HSR) extensions would blanket Taiwan proper in four 90-minute commute blocs to facilitate regional economic and livelihood integration, Railway Bureau Deputy Director-General Yang Cheng-chun (楊正君) said in an interview published yesterday. A project to extend the high-speed rail from Zuoying Station in Kaohsiung to Pingtung County’s Lioukuaicuo Township (六塊厝) is the first part of the bureau’s greater plan to expand rail coverage, he told the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times). The bureau’s long-term plan is to build a loop to circle Taiwan proper that would consist of four sections running from Taipei to Hualien, Hualien to
RSS