On March 23rd I accompanied the Director of the Belgian Office in Taipei Frédéric Verheyden to visit a public primary school in Hsinchu County, the Shi Hsing Elementary School in Zhubei City. This large 2000-students school located 10 minutes drive from the Headquarters of the famous TSMC group, was inaugurating its newly renovated multimedia and multilingual library. 

We were invited to attend its inauguration ceremony along with representatives from central and local government authorities who helped in funding this state-of-the-art school library. The whole morning spent at this local public school was for me a refreshing look at how the Taiwanese public education landscape was slowly changing and needs all the help it can get.

Taiwan’s education system, with its 12 years of fundamental education program, experienced a major reform in 2019 driven by the necessity for students to acquire core literacy, a diverse & wholesome set of competencies but also better international awareness. 

This meant that instead of learning how to ace exams with endless loads of homework, instead of spending their entire childhood and youth at cram schools learning English words and ancient Chinese poems by heart, students will actually be able to enjoy learning, by getting fundamental learning schemes combining a broader range of subjects such as coding, arts and perhaps even how to climb trees. The aim was to legitimize the global trend of teaching science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) to kids, but also to expose them to more foreign cultures so as to broaden their horizons. In other words, to help them become who they want to be and be better prepared for the future. 

Earlier in March, I attended my third-grade daughter's Parents & Teachers meeting, which was meant for the teachers to introduce the semester’s curriculum and for us to visit our kids’ learning environment. On the classroom windows a number of children’s drawings were displaying the “World’s Most Famous Buildings”, where surprisingly (yet understandingly), I found on 7 out of 10 pictures the iconic Taipei 101 Tower.

It first puzzled me that my daughter's classmates were so ethnocentric, thinking Taiwan is really the center of the world, then on second thought I realized it wasn’t out of pride but out of actual lack of basic knowledge about the actual World Most Famous Buildings.

It was relieving though to see my daughter’s drawing of the Great Wall, or some other kids’ Big Ben or Tokyo Sky Tower. It’s really obvious that more global awareness is needed in our kids’ curriculum.

Today there is an evident shift happening in Taiwan with both the top-down educational guidelines public schools have received and the willingness of educators to change their overall teaching methods. Not just because it makes sense, but because it is getting urgent. The demographics are alarmingly telling the society at large that there soon won’t be enough workers in factories and companies and administrations, there won’t be enough taxpayers in the national social security and health insurance schemes, enough talents to innovate in the different industries, or even enough students to keep schools open. 

In the entire education system from primary, middle to high schools principals and education directors are experimenting with many new ways of ensuring that kids are learning all the fundamentals to attain core literacy (素養) and be ready to live in a much different Taiwanese society in the years to come; and ultimately, to become smarter than their parents in coping with a challenging society in the future. 

There has always been in Chinese culture the ideal that kids acquire the Five Teachings of Life (五育), namely Ethics, Intelligence, Physical education, Socialisation and Aesthetics (德智體群美). But generations of Taiwanese have experienced archaic teaching systems where everything was to be learned by heart in mind-numbing, non-didactic manners conditioned by countless exams to test how well you can reproduce what you learned by heart.

Believingly, the workforce trained by such education contributed to the renowned “manufacturing” model that makes up most of Taiwan’s industrial successes. But as this “OEM- economy” is running out of breath, today Taiwan realizes that it needs a more creative, humane, and open-minded workforce in order to rise as a more innovative and high-tech economy.

(Source: Liu Song-Yuan)

The Ministry of Education’s 2019 education reform was designed with such a shift in mind. According to UNESCO’s operational definitions since 2003 of the concept of literacy, it is “the ability to identify,  understand,  interpret,  create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a  continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve his or her goals,  develop his or her knowledge and potential, and participate fully in community and wider society.

This is a completely new paradigm as scholars would call it. Taiwan now wants its kids to become themselves. To have the right baggage of knowledge and creativity to choose an (artistic, scientific, software, or literary) career that they yearn for, to develop a critical mind with enough international awareness, aesthetic training, the common sense of judgment, and most importantly, an opinion of their own. And society knows that this shift is necessary for our children to cope with future challenges.

This can be seen for instance with major universities having provided first-year students to have “undeclared majors” (including the prestigious National Taiwan University). Also, New Taipei City launched last year a city-wide subsidy program called “New Taipei Innovative Teaching Accelerator” to fund schools to teach innovative subjects related to new technologies (AR/VR/XR, coding, 3D printing, e-commerce, electronics and IoT, artificial intelligence...etc), with international dimensions and cross-disciplinary approaches.

Altogether the program was to deploy 1 billion NTD to fund up to 25 schools in the next 3 years. On January 21, this program held its own Demo Day were school principals, education directors, and teachers competed in a tight “pitching contest” before a jury for up to NT$5 million annual funding for each awarded project.  

These initiatives are great signs of Taiwan catching up with the global educational trends, following for instance President Obama’s “Computer Science for All'' program or India’s adoption of new education technologies to improve learning inequalities. However, I believe as more foreign talents pour in from all corners of the world to Taiwan due to the rampage the COVID pandemic is causing anywhere else in the world, this is also momentum for this pool of newcomers to truly elevate the Taiwanese youth in the schools and campuses across the island. 

As schools are more open to expose students to more global, pluralistic, multicultural, and diverse points of views, this may be a good opportunity to bridge the foreign talents stranded in Taiwan with all these hungry student campuses needing to see more of what’s truly going on in the world (and not just experience it on Tik Tok, Instagram or Netflix!)

From left to right Philippe Tzou (Wallonia Export-Investment Agency) & Frederic Verheyden (Director of the Belgian Office in Taipei), Cheng Yuan-Chuan (鄭淵全） section chief for teachers training and the arts at Ministry of Education. (Source: Liu Song-Yuan)

About the author:

Philippe Tzou is the director of the Wallonia Export-Investment Agency in Taipei, as part of the Belgian Office in Taipei promoting Belgian trade and investment interests in Taiwan. He is also a tech-savvy mentor for young entrepreneurs, a book lover (particularly French language comic books!) and an active Rotarian at a local chapter in New Taipei. 

Have you read?

♦ Aiming to Create a “Bilingual Nation”
♦ Taiwan’s Bilingual Education Needs Critical Thinking
♦ Taiwan doesn't really want to be a "bilingual country"

Uploaded by Penny Chiang