The Humanist Challenge in Taiwan's Education: Liberation, Social Justice and Ecology

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Notes

¹Calculation by Ming-sho Ho, based on Ministry of Education data.

²For further information on these inequalities, see Luoh 2001, and Yu & Su 2006.

³Taipei County is Taiwan's most populous administrative territory. It has large numbers of rural migrants from Southern Taiwan.

⁴For more information on these movements, see M. Ho 2006; T. Ho 1990; Lin 1989; and Wright 2001.

⁵Huang's father-in law was Su Tung-ch'i, a veteran opposition politician who was sentenced to death in 1962 for his involvement in a pro-independence movement. Due to international pressure, the KMT regime commuted it into life imprisonment. Su was released following Chiang Kai-shek's death in 1975.

⁶Many of the sectoral organizations that emerged in education were divided by this cleavage. For example, the University Law Reform League did not have a position, but the Taiwanese Association for University Professors was pro-independence.

⁷The Awakening Foundation, originally a feminist publisher founded in 1982, was Taiwan's first women's movement organization. The Homemakers’ Union was an organization of housewives that campaigned for environmental protection and had a committee on education. It was formed in 1987 and became a foundation in 1989.

⁸Neill developed his ideas about the innate goodness of children and became an advocate of pedagogies based on freedom, play, and participatory democracy in the 1920s when he set up Summerhill. His approach was an alternative to the harsh discipline and mechanical rote learning in British schooling since the 19th century and so had an obvious resonance in Taiwan.

⁹Later, Huang expressed his preference for a voucher system that would minimize differences in fees and offer parents real choices (See Ho 2006, 83; Huang 1998, 12).

¹⁰In an interview (May 5, 2010), Huang revealed that he was more concerned about the quality of university education than the public-private choice. He wrote many articles against the proposal to upgrade junior universities into full universities, which he saw as driven by bureaucratic expedience, but only one piece stating his preference for American-style state universities. On the whole, Huang has been consistent in his belief that public universities should expand available opportunities, while private universities should be encouraged to develop diversity.

¹¹See Hsueh 1995 and TLF 1993 for further details of these campaigns.

¹²Interview with Lee Chung-chi, May 30, 2008.

¹³Chang's research, for example, showed that because Taiwan's industrial upgrading had created a high demand for skilled labor, state manpower planning and streaming in secondary education was obsolete, so a laissez-faire approach should be adopted instead. These findings supported the HEF's demand for ending streaming and expanding higher education in order to create a fairer system.

¹⁴For further details, see T. Cheng 2001, 34; Y. Chu 1994, 121–122.

¹⁵A few are CUs in name only. Set up by local politicians cashing in on the CUs’ popularity, they are run like regular adult education institutes or contracted to private universities as extension centers.

¹⁶The state does not recognize these diplomas as degrees, but Taiwan's National Open University allows some credits to count towards its degrees.

¹⁷For further details on these points related to citizenship and civil society, see C. Ho (2004).