國教劃大餅~好想吃山東大餅 (Mia)
Mia
Circling Around Lengthening Compulsory Education
In the hope of narrowing down the tuition difference between public and private high schools, integrating high schools with local community and changing the Entrance Examination system, Prime Minister Su Jen-Chang gave an impetus to 12-year compulsory education in policy address at Legislative Yuan with expectation to enforce the scheme by this year. Also, attending high schools without taking entrance exams will soon come in to realization by 2009. It seems MOE is in the moon of dividing new education categories again. Let's put it this way.
The scheme of lengthening compulsory education to 12 years has been struggling for almost 30 years from ministers of education Chu Hui-Sen to Huang Jung-Tsun, but the dream still has not come true. Obviously, the difficulties in this project are beyond our imagination.
The enrollment rate of high school was over 108% in Taiwan, including informal education. Usually, aside from whether high school education is compulsory, the statistics proves that we have a strong foundation to put 12-year compulsory education into practice. In addition, the implement of the 12-years scheme is predictable with decreasing education population in the future. However, without well-organized policy, 12-year compulsory education should not be carried out only for the pleasure of those politicians who only think of education reforms during election period.
First thing to start with it that we are not sure if Taiwan economy is capable of developing 12-year compulsory education and whether we have efficient resources like teachers, curriculums, land, schools, dormitories and facilities. On the other hand, compulsory education or basic education in Germany, Japan and France are all under 11 years while they owned $30,000 GDP in 2007 comparing with ours $13,000. Therefore, without explicit financial analysis and policy, rushing into extending 12-year compulsory education will have negative results.
Next, before extending the compulsory education, we should take a close look at our selective education system, which now provides multiple entrance programs such as The Basic Academic Competence Test and admission by recommendation and screening when it comes to entering high schools. In fact, if the new scheme does come into play, the academic pressure and flaws in the selective education system will last much longer even when students attend high schools unless either the system reach a new breaking point or we find better alternatives.
Thirdly, why extending compulsory education? Without tackling the existing problems in our selective education system and education system first, more problems like curriculum reform, cram schools, student numbers limit, crime rate of juvenile, lack of learning interest and campus violence will follow after the new changes. Instead of examining the problems in the systems fundamentally, simply extending the length of basic education will incur more problems in the future.
Also, with the fact that the education population has been decreasing, the first priority for the government would be how to maintain the educational quality while the future education population is on the decrease. Based on the report by Council for Economic Planning and Development in 2005, there were 1.07million high school students while in 2006 the numbers went down to 970 thousand, meaning 100 thousand students will be disappear from total numbers in five years. From demography and educational resources' perspectives, the government should satisfy what students need and focus more on raising the educational quality rather than expanding student numbers.
In the past, Ministry of Education once mainly extended vocational education as a way of lengthening compulsory education. However, there was no further reaction from the public because MOE set a negative example of experimenting solely on one education system. What MOE should have done was include both vocational schools and senior high schools as experiment objects and not just students from low-income family. Furthermore, after experimenting on 12-year compulsory education, MOE should realize more that many prestigious high schools such as Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School, National Taichung First Senior High School, National Tainan First Senior High School, Taipei First Girls High school, National Taichung Girls' First High School, The Kaohsiung Municipal Kaohsing Senior High School, Kaohsiung Municipal Girls' Senior High School, National Tainan Girls' Senior High School...etc, have their superior traditional school spirit, if the MOE cancel the selective education system to high school, these schools might take much stronger attitude against 12-year compulsory education to show their discontent.
Last, now we call our basic education as compulsory education though former ministers of education had raised the projects with different names. But the extension scheme should be defined as compulsory education, civil education or fundamental education is still indecisive because they are all different in the concepts, forms, expense distributions and applications. In fact, the government does pay the bill speaking of compulsory education, but as for the fundamental education, the case is
All in all, I am not mourning over 12-year compulsory education. However, if the problems above still remain unsolved, announcing the implement of lengthening compulsory education would only be circling around dividing new education categories.
專有名詞參考
http://english.moe.gov.tw/public/Data/7710175271.pdf
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1樓搶頭香
麥可意見
whether we have efficient resources like teachers, curriculums, land, schools, dormitories and facilities.
→校舍指的是壆校的教室(schoolhouse),應該不是宿舍,請參考,哈