The alchemy of educational reform discourses in contemporary Taiwan: translation processes, limits, and the political

Abstract

Contemporary educational reform discourses in Taiwan call for the modernization of education to meet the needs of society of the 21^st century. The principles and rules of ‘reason’ that historically order educational discourses can’t be taken for granted. This article uses Popkewitz’s notion of alchemy to think about the principles. The notions of democracy and globalization provide the analytic ‘tools’ to consider the processes of translation from political programs to educational reform discourses. It is argued that ironically the translation models of educational reform require a particular epistemological structuring of agency, but while recognizing how it does not produce harmony of what is being told in political programs. Three ways of thinking about the alchemy of political in educational reform discourses are offered. It then turns to the delineation of the changing role of teachers, students, and the textbooks that mapped the ‘modern’ child in educational reform discourses. The apparent paradox that evidences the limits of current discourses about democracy and globalization, then, has a critical reflection.

Keywords:

• Educational reform discourses
• globalization
• democracy

Reviewing Editor:

• Arif H. Kabir, School of Education, Deakin University School of Education, Australia

SUBJECTS:

• Teachers & Teacher Education
• Theory of Education
• Curriculum Studies
• Education Policy & Politics
• Education Studies
• Higher Education

Introduction

In late-twentieth-century Taiwan, the advent of political democratization brought about new mediating institutions and social relations through which the configuration of educational discourses was rewritten and the call for educational reform emerged. The democratic promise of a modern society embodied in the reform is important; yet the particular principles of educational reform assumed to fulfill this promise cannot be taken for granted. This article uses Popkewitz’s (2004a) notion of alchemy to think about the principles: Schooling and its school subjects embody translation processes that convert the ‘things’ of disciplinary fields into pedagogical practices through which action and reflection are produced (see Popkewitz, 2010). They are, however, not merely processes of replication but should be viewed as processes of creation (see Popkewitz, 2008, 2010).

The first section briefly introduces the history of Taiwanese educational reform to map the configurations of the ‘modern’ child. The second section argues that the principles ordering educational reform discourses are drawn from the notions of democracy and globalization discourses to shape what constitutes ‘modern’ education. On the one hand, the notion of democracy functions as the planning of the pedagogical rules that are linked to political/global norms about participation and citizenship. This article recognizes that it is in the context of planning in the name of ‘democratic education’ that the narration space is narrowed and thus creates hierarchy (see Rancière, 1991). On the other hand, democracy is understood as a challenge to the distribution of the sensible (see Friedrich et al., 2010; Rancière, 1991), which unveils the obstacles to its reasonable fulfillment. Thinking of educational reform discourses in this way thus complicates a homogenous version of knowledge production conceptualized by ‘democratic’/global ideals. The discourses about educational reform entail multiple epistemic forms under the banner of democracy. This paper provides three ways to think about the movements of the educational reform discourses.

The third section of the article turns to the delineation of the contours of educational reform. They include the changing relationship between the political governance and teachers, the conceptualization of the subjectivities through the ‘empowerment’ of students, and the ‘deregulation’ of textbooks¹. This section examines existing academic articles, government reports, policy documents, and the roles and interests of various stakeholders involved in the formulation and implementation of educational reform discourses. The methodology I use here is through the perspective of the Foucaultian discourse analysis (see Popkewitz & Brennan, 1998). It deliberately departs from a struggle/submission framework that typically presumes populational reasoning as based on a settlement of value distinctions that in turn generate the analysis through strategies of essentialization and homogenization. It opens new possibilities for rethinking the ‘field’ formulation of educational reform discourses by viewing the subject formation as an array of mediating forces situated within multiple and uneven effects. As such, the lines of arguments that comport the ‘modern’ educational reform discourses are not merely subject to ‘empirical’ demands for demonstrating the ‘facts’ of teaching cultures. They emerge from a grid of historically produced discursive practices that conceive of discourse as productive, of context as a set of texts (see Friedrich et al., 2010). The approach taken here, therefore, recognizes that the alchemy of educational reform discourses embodies the translation processes that require a particular epistemological structuring of agency. What is important, then, are the principles that order the reforms through which acts of reflection imposed upon the subjects are produced. In doing so, they bring into view not only a better understanding of intersections and the various non-foundational manifestations of reform but also help glimpse the aporia² embedded in democratic education.

Fabricating educational reform discourses and the modern self in Taiwan

The calls for modernization in educational reform discourses reached their culmination in the 1990s in Taiwan. On April 10, 1994, a demonstration (the 410 Educational Movement) was held to call for a modernization of education. Huang Wuxiong, the leader of the demonstration and also a professor at National Taiwan University, mentioned that the contents of modern Taiwanese education should include a) respect for autonomy, the invention of individuality, and an emphasis on the education of autonomy of all ethnic groups and minority groups through which multicultural education can be developed; and b) the idea that the main goal of education is not to categorize, to rank, or to classify people. (Huang, 1997, p. 14). In response to the demonstration, the Commission of Educational Reform (CER) was organized in 1996. The report of CER articulated that education should be democratized through which a humanized education would be constructed and students would be respected in schools. Education should be ‘pluralistic’ through which the differences in all students should be recognized. Furthermore, members of CER believed that education should be globalized and technologized to meet the challenges of future technologies (Lee, 2006).

The 410 Educational Movement and CER’s comments, however, do not come out of a social vacuum. As Chang (1993) argues, the emergence of the waves of social movements that proliferated in the 1990s in Taiwan cannot be divorced from their political context. Diverse ways of seeing and discussing the child in 1990s Taiwan also embody such connections. The educational reform marked a different conceptualization of the child, as mediated by democracy and globalization’s strong focus on social restructuring and market capitalism. In 1990s Taiwan, the assortment of powers that had been previously beyond the domain of a statist framework came to the fore due to the lifting of martial law (see Wang, 1992; Yu, 1995 & Lin, 1998). The advent of democracy helped build a platform that not only made possible the reversion of Fa tong,³ but also made possible shifting state-citizen relations via holding the direct elections of central-level governors (see Yu, 1995).

Together with liberal democracy, another line of reasoning that enabled the articulation of a different conception of state-citizen relations and therefore a different orientation of the child in the 1990s educational reform discourses is the advent of globalization discourses. Globalization here refers to the circulation in the form of capital, goods, information, and travel of people occurring since the 1950s. Globalization made possible the ideas of worldwide interdependence in multiple ways that culminated in the 1990s (see Chiang, 2002). It is within such context that stagist and developmentalist assumptions about nationhood (first/third world), political economy (capitalist/communist), and personhood (civilized/primitive) are to be categorized in calibrating the condition of proof for the assessment of ‘progress’ or ‘success’.

Meanwhile, it helped inform the new type of political and pedagogical projects that in turn led to the incorporation of ‘progress’ and the exclusion of the ‘others’. The notion of the others not only denotes third-world nations, as opposed to their Western counterparts, but it also implies a fear of maintaining the status quo, which means that a ‘higher’ level of living standard will not be attained (Mao & Chang, 2005). Globalization thereby expresses the economic and intellectual ‘reality’ of restructuring the nation that would significantly reorient conceptions of humanity and consequently, the child.

It is in this context that democracy and globalization function in the ordering practices of teaching and teacher education that embody principles to shape and fashion the boundaries of participation, cooperation, and multiple solutions through which ‘progressive’ educational discourses would be practiced. For instance, the discussion of the legacy of Fa tong, the exclusion of the local language (see Laio & Yang, 1986), the perpetuation of sexism and Han ethnocentrism in textbooks (see Hsieh, 1990 & Sun, 1994), and the characteristics of the child’s problem solving are linked to liberal and political norms about participation and citizenship.

That a different way of thinking about schooling and children does not necessarily suggest that it would in turn bring about a purely different kind of children and thus the previous discourses pertaining to children were therefore marginalized. This paper suggests that educational reform discourses that have mainly linked the international trading conception of globalization and liberal democracy to the production of the modern child is not an essentialist conception, but rather an ongoing set of processes through which the two vectors of globalization and democracy could inform and contradict one another. It is also a lens through which the previously ‘backward’ belief could be glimpsed. As such, when speaking of the educational reform discourses in 1990s Taiwan, they stretch elsewhere outside of the time/space in which they became audible. The reforms and resulting child are not taken-for-granted beliefs that became immersed in an objective discursive space but rather constituted a rupture in ways of thinking about schooling as well as ruptures in ways of reasoning the children.

The suggestions on educational reform are of interest, then, not in terms of whether they tell the truth about how the ‘educational ailments’ should be cured, but in terms of the broader discourses available to construct what enabled the articulation of schooling to a belief in the centering of a child that called itself ‘modern’.

The alchemy of the educational reform: Democracy and globalization as the translation tools and the limitations

The constitution of educational reform as the progressive education strategy that is particularly modern, or at least more modern than the previous Fa tong educational belief, arises through narratives of education frequently referred to as ‘development’ (Chakarabarty, 2000). Such a requirement for comparing educational concepts across discrete, connected phases in linear time creates a structural and temporal dualism that assumes a basic power theory. In particular, the critical pedagogy embedded in neo-Marxism has been frequently noted. The approach was deployed to challenge some versions of non-neutrality and vested interests in the formation of objects to reconsider the child in chains of Being and theories of development. Within the field of educational research, scholars and researchers have employed it in various ways, such as expressing the voice that has been suppressed and contextualizing identity position as ownership within a hierarchical system (Hsu, 2003; Mao, 2008; Ou, 2006), as a sequential presentism (see Chen, 2003), or as a taxonomy that makes stratification variables available (see Chen & Wang, 2006; Ou, 1985). Several buzzwords emerge from this strategy, including voice, personal identity, empowerment, and social reproduction (see Apple, 1986; Whitty, 1985).

There is no denying that critical pedagogy theories constitute the significant theoretical foundation in curriculum studies, but in this paper, I criticize the analytic configuration of critical pedagogy insofar as it enables one to see only the limited dimensions of Neo-Marxism. It has consequently become blind to other alternative possibilities. I maintain that the discussion of educational reform needs to turn away from Marxian–centered approaches and to return to a paradigm in which both ontological status and issues of discursive epistemology are glimpsed. As such, the task of uncovering the multiple narratives at work in educational reform that have been silenced needs to be explored through Popkewitz’s historiography of alchemy.

In contemporary US school reform, Popkewitz argues, the principles that order school subjects ‘are generated historically through particular translation tools drawn from psychology’ (Popkewitz 2010, p. 414). The school subjects that students learn are not something about psychology, or merely the learning of disciplinary knowledge. Popkewitz is concerned with the translation processes of school subjects that convert the practices of mathematics, for instance, into psychological concepts such as lifelong learning and problem-solving. The psychologies of pedagogy are further linked to the social values through which systems of reason imposed upon the subjects are produced. However, the translation processes never result in a consensus version of the stories within the disciplines. Thus, it is important to recognize that the principles guiding the ordering of academic courses are the outcome of the enactment of psychological ideas that simultaneously confront displacements as a result of the interplay between power production and cultural theses. They gave rise to the notion of alchemy, as defined by Popkewitz (2010, p. 413).

A similar approach can also be deployed to think about educational reform as an alchemy in late-twentieth-century Taiwan. The alchemy of the educational reform discourses, however, does not function through psychology. The translation practices of democracy into ways of seeking to exercise authority over persons operate in the case of the Taiwanese educational field. The prior discussion of the alchemy of educational reform made the assumption that the material to be taught is harmonious, and that democratic and globalized notions serve as means of producing mastery of the ontological ‘facts’ that are to be learned (Popkewitz, 2010). There is an ironic quality to the translation models that speaks to the social construction of knowledge and the democratic future of learning and information societies. Those societies are, in fact, not democratic after all. The pedagogical planning in the name of democracy, for instance, is ordered by the truth-telling practices embodied in the consensual nature of Taiwanization school subject ‘content’. The potential for oppressed people to participate and have their voices heard is a key component of the democratic worldview. By implementing the appropriate combination of institutional and hermeneutical adjustments, it is about assigning a portion to each group involved (Freire, 2000). The attention given to consensual knowledge omits the relationship between cultural practices and knowledge production in school subject content. Furthermore, the translation practices of democracy embody and order ‘knowledge’ through particular liberal political theories of participation and citizenship that go unexamined in the pedagogical models (see Popkewitz, 2010).

On the other hand, democracy is perceived as a challenge to the distribution of the sensible (see Rancière, 2004) that enables the reality and alteration of options. Prior to its emphasis on the partition of the sensible, this movement revealed the dearth of established normativity for the division and ‘the sheer contingency of any social order’(Rancière, 1999, p. 15). In this instance, democracy is used as a subversion to negate the pedagogical planning in the name of democracy. It shows the paradox regarding not only the democratic practices of decentering forces vis-à-vis homogenized trends in Taiwanzation, but unveils the limits of the discourses about educational reform. In actuality, democratic education reform encompasses a variety of epistemic forms. When we reposition democracy, we might not take the bounds for granted (see Giddens, 1998; Goodson, 2014).

As such, an alternative style for thinking about the translation models of democracy into the educational reform discourses provides a reasonable site to investigate other possibilities for the curriculum. The purpose of focusing on educational reform studies, then, is not to universalize these studies in curriculum and teacher education but to consider a style of reasoning for approaching different tasks of translation for school curriculum and didactics (see Popkewitz, 2008).

First, we can think of democracy as simultaneously having qualities that sustain both nouns (unities) and verbs (particularities). The former undertake mental objects that are to contextualize identity position in a hierarchical system that flows sequentially; the latter embody the continual interaction and modifications in which the objects of educational reform are structured and systematized through particular strategies. The overlap of unity and particular qualities of educational reform is not to proclaim a sociopolitical constructive position to education. Rather, what constitutes the configurations of educational reform is only partially shaped by social practices (Popkewitz, 2010).

Secondly, this highlights the conditions under which democracy functions as the relatively stable (a priori) definition that propels ontological production—a tactic that is both required and insufficient when considering discourses around educational reform (see Baker, 2013; Chakarabarty, 2000). The remaking of the kids with the purpose of reshaping society in the name of democracy requires a particular epistemological structuring of agency from which the planning of the pedagogical orders is made possible. Yet democracy also incites an uncertainty of any kind of planning, unveiling the obstacles to its reasonable fulfillment. These ways of viewing the tasks of educational reform create what Popkewitz called ‘the alchemy of the political’. It travels ‘in the partitions of what is taken as ‘sensible’ and the sensibilities produced through the pedagogical distinctions, differentiations, and divisions that order the ‘learning’ of school subjects and its participatory structures’ (Popkewitz, 2010, p. 419). The discourses about educational reform, then, should be understood as traversing in multiple assemblies and disconnections through which instructional ‘methods’ are stylized (see Popkewitz, 2004b). By doing so, the concern is not to adjudicate if educational reform is truly successful. Rather, it complicates, for instance, a homogenous version of education by a refutation to read the textbook contents as a ‘factual site’. Even when the textbooks attempted to do so, they would produce more than one kind of cosmology in the context of democracy.

Thirdly, central to rewriting the history of educational reform’s emergence and its effects also elicit an analysis of discourse that posits itself within discursive practices. Discursive practices here are not perceived primarily in a transcendental sense that would reduce the accumulated discourses to a fixed starting point or an individual but rather as circulatory, in dialectic relation with knowledge, and operating as a series of effects. As Foucault writes:

Discursive practices are not purely and simply ways of producing discourse. They are embodied in technical processes, in institutions, in patterns for general behavior, in forms of transmission and diffusion, and in pedagogical forms which at once, impose and maintain them (Foucault, 1980, p. 200).

I thereby trace the effects of reform’s emergence in pedagogical discourse through three different but interrelated ‘fields’. They are made possible through a rethinking of teacher education, a redefinition of the roles of the students, and the restructuring of textbooks that together shaped the reworked subjects of educational reform discourses. The approach deployed here, however, should be understood as a shorthand strategy to help me position the necessary historical and cultural specificity, and at the same time manage to exceed it. That is, to view the three fields as the relatively durable (a priori) definition and at the same time destabilize the ground upon which evolutionary educational history has been written to help elucidate the configurations of the modern child. In sum, the approach that I speak about here is not just of the passage of time and evolution of ‘things’ or technologies to document existing events. It is a history of some events that happen in time to modify, transform, and comprise the articulation of entities that are the objects of educational reform. It is a history that is not reduced to a single author, cause, and origin. Rather, it is glimpsed through overlapping institutions, movements, and ‘things’ through which the objects of educational reform are given intelligibility and assume their ‘modernization’.

New template for judging teachers: Teacher as curriculum maker?

Thinking of the role of teachers in this manner also brings to the fore multiple conditions of educational reform efforts through organizing what is (im)possible to see and act upon(see Lin, 2018). For instance, the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum offered a new discursive framework through which to interpret the role of teachers in light of the concepts of empowerment and deregulation. They could show up in areas such as curriculum development objectives and teacher-made individualized curricula (Chang et al., 2010). Moreover, a competent teacher was thought to have a less hierarchical connection with students, less explicit pacing and sequencing guidelines, and a more diffuse and multifaceted set of evaluation criteria (Yang 1997, p.iii). The pedagogical discourses about teacher-as-curriculum maker create a space of ethical relations in which the teacher functions to ‘challenge’ the previously banking model of education (Freire, 2000).

The ‘autonomy’ and ‘empowerment’ of the teacher are not just value configurations given to teaching when policy and pedagogical models are reviewed. They represent a paradigm shift whose tenets are to both ‘empower’ individual acts and establish an order to nation building (Chen, 2005). According to Popkewitz (2008), a teacher is a person who, having once played the function of an information transmitter, now promotes democracy through lifelong learning, which involves an ongoing process of knowledge construction. They are also principles for creating collective belonging by contrasting the past to the ‘modern’ in the learning of school subjects that make sure progress can be maintained in a globalization world. It is in the context that democracy and neoliberal globalization function in the alchemic practices of teacher education.

The translation of democracy and neoliberal globalization into schooling, however, was not natural. That the good and progressive teachers are placed in relation to new generalizations did not mean they were taken up in all classrooms thereafter (Chang et al., 2010; Liu & Wang, 2012). There is an ironical quality to the translation models of democracy that stand in relation to the sociopolitical construction of teaching practices.

The current system of entrance examinations, which unintentionally distorted what constituted a good teacher, was a major source of motivation, information, exclusion, and decentering for the role of the teacher under educational reform discourses that have allowed teachers to be ‘empowered’ to design curriculum, arrange pedagogy, and assess performance on his or her own (Chang et al., 2010). The position of democracy as a translation model that claimed the teachers’ difference based on the heterogeneous renditions of cosmology of personhood was not diverse at all (Hung, 2010). The embodiment of continual interaction among different actors function to ‘rework’ the centralized pedagogical systems was to a large extent, overshadowed by the previously traditional curriculum that linked itself to globalization discourses under the banner of competition. Within such a context, one of the most important missions for teachers remains whether or not they promise students high scores on examinations (Lee, 2010). The determination of the roles of teachers in the context of the educational reform discourses, then, did not offer smooth narratives that transferred linearly from the so-called ‘traditional teacher’ to the ‘progressive’ one (Hsu, 2003). What constituted the discourses about the roles of the teachers were only partially fashioned by the democratic practices. The shifting roles of the teacher, therefore, are not necessarily produced within contexts shaped by corresponding cultural/political relations and can merely be glimpsed outside the bounds of standardized, globalized, and homogenized pedagogical models.

The lifelong learner in educational reform discourses?

In educational reform discourses, the answers to what to do with children in an open society became one of the most important pedagogical issues. The notion of ‘open’ here refers to the positioning of the student as an active learner in a child-centered curriculum brought about by the translation practices of democracy and neoliberal globalization discourses. Overregulation, a test-oriented school culture, a subject-centered curriculum, learning materials that were out of touch with real life, and the ossification of traditional teaching methods are just a few of the educational ‘ailments’ that Taiwan’s educational system adopted to justify their inappropriateness and inferiority (Lee, 2010, p. 17). It is within such a framework that at least three discursive conditions made the renditions of the new roles of students seem plausible at the time (see Lin, 2018).

1. Do not let your child get behind at the beginning

Much of what is spoken about in contemporary educational reform reports is rapid change as the ubiquitous feature of information-based economies and international competition (see, e.g., Common wealth, 1997). Reorganizing education and arranging a child’s fundamental skills to get ready for this future are strategies for taming change by generating principles about how to act in the present (Popkewitz, 2008). It became particularly important for Taiwan, given its isolation from the international community since the 1970s. Several attempts were made in the field of education that were thought of as ways of reshaping humanity that would ultimately restructure the social order ascribed to global competitiveness. They included the emphasis on the learning of English that was believed to make its citizens more competitive in the international marketplace. Some local governments were able to get permission to start teaching English in primary schools as early as 1993 since Taiwan was positioned as an Asian Pacific learning center (Mao, 2008). Furthermore, enrollment at the tertiary level has been greatly expanded: the adjustment in the student ratio of senior high schools over senior vocational schools went from 3:7 to 5:5, technical colleges were upgraded to universities, and universities were encouraged to set up their own operating funds, thus gaining more autonomy in managing funds from non-state/private resources (Chen, 2007). It was thought that by doing this, sufficient human capital with research and development capabilities would be produced, in line with the Executive Yuan’s Statute for Upgrading Industries, which emphasized the introduction of novel products and services through research and development in general (see Wang & Mai, 2001 & Chen, 2007).

It is within such frameworks that the pedagogies of English learning and efforts to internationalize schooling may insert a particular hierarchy of ‘expertise’ that narrows the range of reflection and action that, ironically, dilutes rather than enables social reconstruction. For instance, many contended that the educational reform of the soft-liners, which oversimplified curricular content, was the reason why the ‘quality’ of pupils was declining (Mao, 2008). The attention given to learning Science, Computer Technology, and English, for example, are principles of governing the subjects, which marginalized the cultivation of innovation and reading for pleasure that ultimately were morphed into the translation practices of democracy. The subjectivities through which the globalized child is to occur subtly connected with the previously discussed educational ‘ailments’ that constituted aporia embedded in democratic education.

2. Independent and critical thought

Another effect that educational reform discourses brought about is based on the assumption that an empowered learner is capable of reasoning critically that are viewed as ‘emancipatory’ and ‘liberating’ procedures under democratic education. It is within this context that the previously taboo issues such as the 228 Incidents, Han-centrism, sexism, and ethnicity discourses can be articulated (Mao, 2008). The pedagogical focus on who is given representation in the curriculum ordered subliminally the spaces of critical thought. The critical thought of the child functions to assert the notion of ‘being Taiwanese’, for example, entails educational reform discourses that make ‘facts’ of what a child is and how to secure the new image of the child by contrasting it to another value system in its ‘modernization’ guise. That critical reflection can, therefore, take for granted the alchemy of school subjects that is found in educational reform discourses to teach ‘critical thought’ (Popkewitz, 2010). It is not to consider the classifying of the subjects as embodying multiple discursive conditions through which the ideas of ‘who we are’ are produced.

Furthermore, the position of the child with independent thinking away from the ‘ossified’ education does not mean that the previous value system was thereafter abandoned. The national entrance exams still function as the ‘objective and fair’ tracking mechanisms which to a large extent make the cultivation of independent thinking a debatable issue. For example, the new approach to teaching mathematics, known as the constructivist approach, was not advised because it resulted in poor academic performance and faced strong opposition from parents and communities, despite the professors in teacher education believing that it was a great way to foster independent thinking (see Ke, 2005). Thus, the ‘facts” of educational reform discourses not only provide the ‘true’ conception of the child in the democratized and globalized norms but are also fashioned through different assemblies and disconnections.

3. Social involvement, participation, and cooperation

The translation practices of democracy brought into relief the disarticulation between the notion of obedience/group unity and national survival through which the notions of social participation and cooperation are practiced. To a great part, obedience refers to the application of filial piety in family settings and its extension to the broader nation-state, which will ultimately promote harmonious relationships (see Chun, 1994). Making national survival by making obedience/group unity in the past was now replaced with a different concept of citizenship through social participation and cooperation that entail the experience of individual freedom and knowledge construction in a democracy.

By doing this, characteristics of the child’s social participation and involvement are connected to the Foucaultian critique of the docile student bodies/minds that were to be achieved in part through ‘behavior management’, such as the regulations regarding hair length and uniform style (Foucault, 1980; Strawn, 1999). Furthermore, by challenging the relationships between power and obedience in education, the bounds of cooperation and participation are shaped. For instance, knowledge about community discourses is produced through collaboration among the teachers, the students, and the community to question the superiority of Chinese culture over Taiwanese culture (Mao, 2008).

The aforementioned remarks do not imply that the centralized educational system is to be replaced by the ‘soft atmosphere’ of collaborative learning. For example, the emphasis on the Confucian ideal of literary and martial excellence replaced the previous emphasis on the political leader’s charisma and the recovery of mainland China in the educational system, redefining obedience to authority in a ‘softer’ way (see Strawn, 1999). Furthermore, a dilemma existed between the constant paper-based testing and the attempts to cultivate a collaborative decision-making atmosphere. The latter was believed to benefit the child for the cultivation of innovation but detrimental to the getting of high scores. As a result, the emergence of social participation of the child doesn’t suggest the meanings could encode a coherent symbol of the ‘modernized’ child. It does not ‘automatically indicate the texture of what he would be accepted to do, how he would live, what he would look like, and how he would think. It merely suggests how these became possible as questions and concerns’ (Baker, 2001, p. 507). The alchemy of school subjects does not function to replicate what is treated as truth in social participation and cooperation. As intellectual tools are created, processes of substitution and displacement are simultaneously enacted that blur and complicate the boundaries of social participation and cooperation (see Baker, 2009).

Textbook deregulation in educational reform discourses

The notions of ‘empowerment’ or ‘lifelong learner’ embedded in the role of the teachers and the students could not be achieved without the reconstitution of textbooks in educational reform discourses. Deregulation of textbooks mirrored the democratic ideal that allowed for different approaches to curriculum standards that saw subjects taught in schools as immutable notions (Huang, 2000). It also connected itself to ideas such as marketization and Taiwanization (Hsu & Hsu, 2009). Underlying the notions of Taiwanization and marketization were the ordering practices of school subjects’ ‘content’ through particular political structuring that assumed their ‘naturalness’. As such, the positing of the latter side of the curriculum standard/curriculum outline, Sino-focused/Taiwan-focused divides as the ‘superior’ form of schooling should not be understood as a unique pedagogical model initiated by a single author. They are produced as explanations and the accounting of the interaction of things through which Taiwanization and marketization are endowed, which will be exemplified in at least two aspects (see Lin, 2018).

First of all, one of the most important effects that textbook deregulation brought about was the notion of Taiwanization drawn from the translation practices of democracy. It was to be rendered in part through the teaching of Taiwanese history/geography, and in part through the establishment of community-based schooling that bound the trinity of the community/school/parents relationship within which issues such as the school structure could be discussed and the culture and history of a community could be articulated (see Commission on Educational Reform, Executive Yuan, 1996). The two lines of reasoning combined to shape the boundary of ‘community knowledge’ (see Bloch & Tabachinick, 1994) that were seen as analogous to a democratic mode of acting. According to Hsu and Hsu (2009), the democratic principle offered an alternative discursive framework for subject governance that was associated with being a part of the global village, which values diversity and individuality.

The aforementioned remarks did not, however, mean the teaching of Taiwanese history/geography was therefore based on Taiwanese lineage. A reference to cultural China was implicitly incorporated into the compromised measure of ‘ROC on Taiwan’ and explicitly addressed in the pedagogical rule of ‘Rooted in Taiwan, Mindful of the Mainland, Looking out into the World’ (see Chen, 2003). Consequently, a new way of seeing the imagined community embedded in Taiwanese nativism based on the premise of Chinese cultural discourses emerged. The notion of Taiwanization written in the textbooks, therefore, was not merely about representations of the world given as the practices of Taiwanization. It was in this context that the politics of the alchemy navigated in the Taiwanization/Sinicization divide and the divisions produced through the epistemic differentiations that ordered the ‘learning’ of Taiwanization/Sinicization through the interaction among the teachers, the students, and the subject ‘content’.

Secondly, the advent of textbook deregulation brought about marketization within which the National Institute of Compilation and Translation (NICT) acted as the only institutional agency for editing and screening school textbooks was not viable (see Yang, 1997). The elimination of NICT allowed private textbook publishers to edit school textbooks, a process through which multiple choices were built and high-quality textbooks were believed to achieve. Within the framework, it not only embodied democratic participation that entails continual processes of knowledge production in the community-based curriculum but also classified neoliberal globalized concept that highlights the importance of holistic notion in the field-based curriculum. Therefore, the idea behind textbook deregulation was to focus on linguistic terms like ‘quality’ and ‘choices’ (Chang et al., 2010) that made visible their traces by using ‘purified’ versions of the information found within the particular context.

The process of textbook deregulation, however, didn’t suggest that state-controlled textbook production was thereafter replaced with marketization. One major facet that made the seeming absence of distinction between textbook marketization and a centralized educational system was the entrance exam system. The notion of multi-enrollment initiatives and autonomy in the selection of textbooks, for instance, were not positive pursuits within the entrance exam system. For more choice under educational deregulation discourses for many students, teachers, and parents meant heavier reading loads and would also generate more uncertainty or unfairness. In its uneven educational deregulation process, it embodied continual interaction, competition, and compromise among the Ministry of Education (MOE), Commission of Educational Reform (CER), and the private textbook publishers regarding the production of the textbooks and the designation of the curricula. Collectively, they demonstrated that Taiwan’s textbook deregulation was not merely a result of free market forces, since the content of the textbooks became more standardized rather than more diversified (Chang et al., 2010; Chen, 2003). Therefore, it was challenging to determine the boundaries of textbook marketization due to the ‘fairness’ of Taiwan’s entrance exam system (Chang et al., 2010). As such, the processes of textbook deregulation didn’t deliver every dimension of the child to local and privatized images but rather were intricately implicated in the cultural conditions through which the images were articulated as propositions. Thus, the ‘fact’ of the process of textbook deregulation is a proposition, as it not only provides a way to describe phenomena but is also shaped and fashioned through different assemblies and disconnections.

Conclusions

This paper brought together the shifting role of teachers, students, and the deregulation of textbooks to think about the system of reason that orders discourses about educational reform.

The aim of this paper is not to write a history of pedagogical models in a chronological sequence, which would assume that the present is simply the natural consequence of the past (see Foucault, 1979). Nor is it to engage in simplistic reversal, which would problematize developmentalist assumptions about nationhood (First/Third world) and personhood (civilized/primitive) (see Chakarabarty, 2000). In short, I argued that the ‘democratic’ promise of a just society embodied in the reforms is important. Yet, the significance of the paper is to understand how figurations of the child became useful in espousing educational reform discourses that drew on some commonly held, and recently troubled, ideas about modernization that have interlaced educational philosophies. Terms such as democracy and globalization that embody complicated notions of modern education are, therefore, an effect of things coming together from disparate time/space and beyond any individual.

In doing so, I acknowledge that discourses about educational reform are created via interactions between nonhuman ‘actors’ and external political and social forces (Popkewitz, 2010). Through interaction with diverse agencies in establishing relevancies, networks of players impact subjects and types of educational phenomena in the production of ideal things and data, necessitating an epistemic shift in this interaction. It also embodies an ontological divide that coagulates and complicates human bodies on a hierarchy of values. Thus, we can move from the intentions of actors who are to define and rescue the unequal to a better understanding of the principles that structure these rescue strategies as political.

Within such a framework, on the one hand, educational reform discourses entail translation tools that are effects of political democratization and neoliberal globalization. New pedagogical models have been weighed explicitly and implicitly via the perspectives, which help facilitate the subsequent anchoring and self-referential finitude of ‘democratic’ approaches to the sociopolitical and conceptual, laying the groundwork for the unfolding of ‘new modes and possibilities for sequencing, comparison, and normativity’ (Baker, 2009, p. 27). What constitutes a legitimate approach to urgent educational problems elaborated within developmentalized gradations such as ‘Western’, ‘Taiwanese’, and ‘integrated curriculum’, therefore, have left their mark as misguided ‘superiority effects’.

On the other hand, the detachment of a dominant Fa-tong pedagogy whose overt presence as the solidification of nation-state structures previously provided an ‘out’ or ‘others’ always in reserve and in interaction with the democracy-globalization nexus. As a result, the multiple ways in which the word deregulation is inflected through the alchemy of education reform suggests that an absolute reference to deregulation as an automatic moral high ground would require deeper reflection. In particular, the reflection would meet ambiguities around the issue of Fa-tong pedagogy and whether this issue had been left behind by a nation-state formed as a democracy out of previously monarchical heritages (see Chen, 2003). The modernization/Fa-tong distinction therefore ‘allows ‘difference’ to be made and remade, but the eventual blurring of the slash secures a kind of system closure as it takes the form of diffusion’ (Baker, 2013, p. 346). The apparent paradox that evidences the limits of current discourses about democracy and globalization, then, recognizes that ‘curriculum is always an alchemy—the translations are creations and not copies of the original’ (Popkewitz, 2010, p. 417). It is to make the familiar strange (see Baker, 2001; Popkewitz, 2008), questioning precisely that which is taken for granted, given as harmony and conventional. It is therefore important to address these concerns and to begin to ‘deconstruct these seemingly immutable and all-pervasive forces operating, as they do, in numerous social, cultural, and material sites’ (McCarthy & Dimitriadi, 2000, p. 184).

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Yu-Chen Lin

Yu-Chen Lin works as a postdoctoral researcher at National Taitung University, Taiwan. His current research interests focus on how developmentalist visions took hold that have centrally shaped our modern views of children in educational discourses.

Notes

1 The analyses of the three dimensions of the roles of the teachers, the students, and the textbooks are based on my PhD findings (see Lin, 2018).

2 Derrida uses the notion of ‘aporia’ to describe a state of puzzlement, an undecidable moment.

“The nonpassage, the impasse or aporia, stems from the fact that there is no limit. There is not yet or no longer a border to cross, no opposition between two sides: the limit is too porous,permeable and indeterminate” (Derrida, 1993, p. 20).

3 Based on the Fa tong Constitution drafted in 1947, the KMT declared itself the sole legitimate government of China while treating the CCP as a rebel group. Taiwan was thus viewed as a province of China and as a temporary site of the ROC state apparatus for the mission of mainland recovery given that the civil war had not been terminated. In addition, elections for the National Assembly, the Legislative Yuan and the Control Yuan were suspended under the framework of Fa tong (see Chen, 2003).