Taiwan Students launch new movement

Students launch new movement

POLITICAL PUPPETS:The issue of education has dissolved into political rhetoric, as students get legislators’ signatures to support the withdrawal of the revised curriculum

By Alison Hsiao  /  Staff reporter

A student speaks at a press conference in Taipei yesterday, while another student holds up a graphic.

Photo: Chang Chia-ming, Taipei Times

Students opposed to controversial curriculum changes have launched a movement “within the establishment” to complement their activism, collecting legislators’ and legislative candidates’ signatures for a project that calls for not only the withdrawal of the adjusted curriculum, but also the codification of the curriculum adjustment process.

Student representatives held a press conference with a number of legislators and legislative candidates yesterday, saying that while they have had to resort to storming the Ministry of Education building after repeatedly receiving meaningless and disingenuous responses from the government, they are also pushing a project aimed at lawmakers for an “intra-institution” action.

“The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) cannot shirk its responsibilities as the major opposition party. However, when its chairperson, Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), said that she would bear complete responsibility for the issue if the DPP becomes the ruling party, contrary to what might be expected of us, we are actually worried about such rhetoric, as it signifies that political forces could continue to intervene in our education system,” Taoyuan High School Alliance spokesperson Liao Hao-hsiang (廖浩翔) said.

“Without the codification of the curriculum adjusting procedure, political forces can, as we all are now witnessing, easily influence our education,” he added, saying that Tsai has not tabled a clear platform on the issue.

“Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), on the other hand, persistently alleged the student activism has been instigated by the DPP. We are here to sternly clarify that the curriculum issue is not a blue-green or unification-independence struggle,” Liao said. “This is an action for pursuing truth, educational dignity and academic professionalism.”

Tainan Secondary School Student Anti-curriculum Front representative Kuo Tsu-hsin (郭子信) said the students “strongly condemn” the attempts by the KMT.

Anti-black-box Curriculum Action Alliance representative Tu Yu-yin (涂予尹), who is also a Taiwan Association of Human Rights lawyer, railed against Minister of Education Wu Se-hwa (吳思華) for saying he “has no right to withdraw the adjusted curriculum.”

“The ministry maintains that the curriculum adjustments are an administrative matter, rather than a legal matter. If that is so, according to the Administrative Procedure Act (行政程序法), it could then be “abolished by the agency that promulgated it,” which is the Ministry of Education, Tu said.

Tu said that the curriculum-adjusting controversy this time is not an individual issue.

“Our intermediate goal is to examine and supervise the 12-year education guidelines, which has so far failed to meet transparency standards,” Tu said.

“The long-term goal, which pertains to a problem that the students have also noticed, is the legislation of the curriculum adjustment procedure, which concerns publishers’ rights, the students’ rights to learn and teaching freedom for teachers,” Tu said.

Students said they have contacted 147 legislators and legislative candidates who signed their petition and the DPP, the Taiwan Solidarity Union, the People First Party, the Green Party, the Social Democratic Party, the New Power Party and several candidates without party affiliations, including social activist Wang Pao-hsuan (王寶萱) and Aboriginal activist Mayaw Biho, who support their cause.

“While at least seven KMT lawmakers voiced their opposition clearly, 85 percent of them refused to make public their stance, which is actually curious, as we would have thought that they would state their strong opposition. Instead they tried to keep their stance unclear,” Liao said.

The students said KMT Legislator Yang Chiung-ying (楊瓊瓔) was the only KMT lawmaker who had expressed her support.

However, Yang later yesterday dismissed the claim.

There is another KMT lawmaker who has publicly endorsed the students’ call: Chang Chia-chun (張嘉郡) of Yunlin County yesterday said that she agrees that an extraordinary session should be called and the curriculum withdrawn.

Exiled Chinese dissident Wuer Kaixi is among the legislative candidates without party affiliations who have expressed support for the students.

Taiwan Curriculum academic sparks fury

Curriculum academic sparks fury

GEOGRAPHY LESSONS:Curricular adjustment committee convener Wang Hsiao-po said on a political talk show that Taiwan’s capital is Nanjing, with Taipei ‘the current capital’

By Tseng Wei-chen  /  Staff reporter

Shih Hsin University professor Wang Hsiao-po attends a book launch in Taipei on Thursday last week.

Photo: Chen Yi-chuan, Taipei Times

Netizens yesterday accused the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of using education as a propaganda tool for the promotion of its “one country, two areas” (一國兩區) formula, reacting to an article published by a news Web site in China featuring the convener of the Ministry of Education’s curricular adjustment committee, Wang Hsiao-po (王曉波).

Titled “Returning Taiwan’s History Textbooks to ‘One China’: Not Everyone is [former president] Lee Teng-hui (李登輝),” the article published by the Chinese media Web site Guancha.cn on April 29 has triggered heated discussion since it was reposted on the nation’s largest online academic bulletin board system, Professional Technology Temple (PTT), yesterday morning.

Shih Hsin University professor Wang was quoted in the article as saying that the reason adjustments were proposed to high-school curriculum guidelines three years after its implementation was because of misinformation in some history textbooks.

Some textbooks inaccurately described so-called “comfort women” as having volunteered to work in wartime brothels in Japan, he was quoted as saying.

“They also painted Taiwanese who were enlisted to serve in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II as willingly joining the Japanese Army out of patriotism,” he said.

As former of the Chinese Unification Union vice chairman Wang has been a magnet for controversy.

His remarks often trigger an outpouring of fury from the online community, as did his recent accusation that Democratic Progressive Party chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) incited young students to stand up against curriculum changes.

The remark by Wang during a Taiwanese political talk show on Friday that “our country’s capital is Nanjing, but Taipei is the current capital of the Taiwan area” has also resulted in much criticism from netizens.

In the article published by Guancha.cn, Wang was quoted as saying that the biggest changes were made to the geography textbooks, which were drawn up based on the principle of “one country, two areas.”

The adjustments include a change from “China’s largest island is Hainan, while our country’s highest peak is Jade Mountain (玉山)” to “The largest island is Taiwan. Our nation’s highest peak is Mount Everest and its Taiwan area is surrounded by water,” Wang wrote.

Asked what kind of impact the curriculum adjustments had on the KMT’s campaign for next year’s presidential and legislative elections, Wang said they had created a strong cohesive force among pan-blue supporters.

“A lack of ‘national goals’ is a critical problem facing the KMT. The party requires more convincing rhetoric to persuade the public and that was exactly what we aimed to achieve through the curriculum changes,” Wang said in the article.

In an article published in the Chinese-language monthly magazine Straits Review (海峽評論) in September last year, titled “Textbooks on Japanese occupation and Taiwanese history” (日據與台灣史教科書), Wang wrote that the 2012 revisions of high-school curriculum guidelines were the result of compromises that were, in his opinion, “unsatisfactory, but acceptable.”

“After being incorporated with China-centric East Asian cultural history... the 2012 revisions allow Chinese history to take up more than two semesters of teaching hours,” Wang said.

Taiwan ruler Ma Ying-jeou passed Harvard Law School despite thesis with 1000+ errors

Michael RichardsonBoston Progressive Examiner

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March 5, 2009

Ma Ying-jeou   Prince Roy photo 

Republic of China in-exile President Ma Ying-jeou's official biography declares, "Ma received a Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) from HarvardLaw School in 1981, specializing in law of the sea and international economic law."

Ma's doctoral thesis was titled,Trouble Over Oily Waters: Legal Problems of Seabed Boundaries and Foreign Investments in the East China Sea. The paper was good enough to get him a law degree from America's richest university but does not speak well of scholarship standards at Harvard Law School.

Ma's thesis is filled with errors, mistakes, misspellings, mis-attribution, missing words and grammatical problems. The thesis contains over 1,000 errors that violate Harvard's writing guidebook for incoming freshmen students

A retired schoolteacher looked up Ma's thesis because she was interested in his views on the Senkaku Islands. The former teacher was shocked by the sloppy scholarship and got out her red pencil. She spent a year studying the thesis, checking out all the footnotes.

The teacher has not yet found plagiarism but with misattributed material and footnotes that do not check out she is suspicious and continues digging into the academic paper.

Like any good teacher, the tireless researcher took her concerns to Harvard where she was directed to Ma's faculty advisor, Detlev Vagts. Professor Vagts is retired and conveniently didn't keep a copy of the thesis he approved.

In 2008, Vagts told the Harvard Crimson about Ma's thesis, "I thought it was very good, very solid and very sensible both legally and politically." Vagts told the Crimson he had been approached by a reporter in Taiwan about "all the typos" but apparently confused the retired teacher with being a reporter.

Vagts said, "Typos really don't matter that much when you are picking a president." However, Ma was not being picked as a president when he submitted his error-filled thesis for academic credit in 1980.

The English-as-second-language excuse does not cover the thesis mistakes, especially since Ma served as translator for Chiang Ching-kuo during his rule of Taiwan. Many of the errors are stylistic and simply betray sloppy work.

The school teacher asked Vagts to directly comment on Ma's errors. The professor responded in writing betraying his own lack of care with typos. "Although I would like to be helpful with Ma Ying Jeou's thesis m ability to do so is limited.It was not then the rule that we kept a copy of doctoral theses for our library and I do not have one in my possession."

Vagts assured the teacher he had "high standards for approval" and he was "fully satisfied that Ma Ying Jeou met those standards."