High school education in Taiwan

The high school educational system in Asia had long been criticized by intellectuals for its utilitarianism and its irrelevance to university. Taiwan is no exception. The purpose of this article is to analyze the deeply flawed high school educational system and to point out its problems.

The first thing we should know about Taiwan’s high school education is that the design of the course isn‘t for the purpose of letting students fully absorb the knowledge. We require every student to engage in five different fields: Chinese, English, Maths, Natural science, and Social science. Though this design may sound great, it has created an obvious problem, indicating that most of the knowledge we learn is not only useless but also too hard for a high school student to understand. The core problem which is fatal can only be addressed if we put our test system into consideration.

The test system in Taiwan is a little bit complicated compared to other countries. Firstly, the Subject Ability Test takes place in the winter vacation of 12th Grade, which contains all course material from 10th Grade to the first semester of 12th Grade. The type of examination questions mainly consists of multiple-choice and, more often than not, essays. After this test, the students will have two choices. The first is to continue with the interview in hope of being admitted into his dream school, if the interview fails him or he thinks he didn’t do well on the Subject Ability Test, he could have a second chance, which is participating in the Specified Subject Test in July. If he still fails, he will have to wait another year and go through all of this again.

Because of this exhausting system and the inappropriate mentality of Chinese people toward knowledge, considering knowledge as a tool to obtain fame and money, the courses of high school mainly focus on “the subjects of the tests”. Furthermore, even the courses of subjects do not focus on the understanding of the knowledge, instead, “memorizing” a bunch of abstruse knowledge without processing them. This has nothing to do with knowledge itself. And no matter what your interest or specialty is, you will not have the chance to practice it when you are still in high school. Because the design of the courses requires you to pass all of the courses including five different fields before you can obtain your diploma. Under the pressure to get the diploma and to pass the forthcoming exam, the students are forced to “memorize” a lot of knowledge which is of no use for him or her to survive in society. The years of high school quietly slip away while the students are busy “memorizing”, they have no time to explore what their dreams or interests are because their parents and teachers told them it’s more important to get a good score on the test, those who get the chance to choose the school they want are the ones who get higher scores. To conclude, the student’s future is decided by the ability to memorize and the skill of taking the test.

Some people may think this is a rather fair system, but it is not. Try to think about this, there may be some special students who are experts in other fields such as sport or art, but they are not that good at “memorizing”, so they couldn’t enter the university they want to study in for further improvement on their skills. Thus, their talent will just end up buried under the vanity of parents and the expectations of society. It is not that they are inferior to the normal students; they are just not good at “memorizing texts”. Because of this, they must bear the consequence of not being able to enter their university of choice which could have a great impact on their future. Is this fair? This reveals a problematic mindset of Taiwan, or even the Chinese community’s main goal in the education system, which is to promote the values the authorities or elders considered as good. This is made visible by the fact that any activities which may have the possibility to distract students from “learning” is regarded as bad. One shouldn’t be too surprised to see the course schedule they designed, which is to let everyone study the same book, take the same test, to show fairness and cater to the common value of society. What the society and the authorities haven’t considered is that this system cannot select the real capable students. It could only select the students who are good at taking tests. Because the designs of our test questions are too stiff and can be easily conquered by memorizing a lot of “important points”. From this, we can easily predict the inevitable decline of our country, since our authorities had designed a system to reject the real talent and welcome the actual pedant.

In conclusion, Taiwan’s high school education system had suffered the following problems. Firstly, the design of courses is deeply flawed, the knowledge not only irrelevant for university but also is mostly useless for survival in university. Secondly, because of the stressful test system and the inappropriate attitude the society holds toward knowledge, the students in Taiwan are being forced to memorize a lot of important points which will be tested and with a lot of mock tests, small tests, larger tests, all just to get a good score in the final tests. Under this kind of environment, students have no time to explore their interests and specialties because they would be scolded as not engaging in honest work. They are often imposed by their parents, teachers, as well as the society utilitarianist misconceptions. The result is that the students tend to choose the school which is not suitable for them, but it is already too late when they realize. A more serious consequence is that the students who were forced to study in the school they don’t like, tend to learn reluctantly. How could a student learn anything from a school where he or she is reluctant to learn? This is the reason for the absence of those with professional skills, this system has produced a bunch of graduates who didn’t learn a thing in school, how could you expect these students to be professional at anything? The whole country is to take blame. The third problem is the test system. It was designed in a wrong way that can’t select the people society actually needs. Because the spot can be easily taken by anyone who can memorize textbooks. And because of this, students with other interests or specialties will inevitably be refused by college due to their insufficient scores and entry requirements. In other words, the future of the students is decided by the test. I won’t say that the students who get high scores on a test don't work hard, they just took the wrong way to try obtaining knowledge, a system that only focuses on tests can’t provide the knowledge that will make one gain real improvement. And we have lost a bunch of talents in different fields because of this seemingly fair system. We should have been aware of this problem earlier.

It is not right to decide the future of a student by the score when the score can’t represent their characters. It is also not right to deny a student’s interest or dream just because they don't fit the parent’s expectations. A note to the parents: every student is special, we shouldn’t erase their future to make them become what you want them to become. Fundamentally, we should be aware that your children are not your possessions, you have no right to decide their future. And this is the cause of all the problems we mentioned above. The elders always think students should obey their orders and do their assignments, so they normalize every student’s decision to learn in high school. They didn’t realize that their definition of good may be quite the opposite in the lens of a student, because they think the students are still young, their opinions are immature and impractical, what they should do is to accept, not rebel. And parents also tend to decide what their child will become. A common situation is that parents will force the child to fulfill their unfinished dreams because they think they must. All of these, although can’t represent the whole country, are happening in Taiwan now.

Fortunately, there are still some education workers who haven’t forgotten the core value of education which is to let the students gain knowledge that will do them real good. They have noticed the issue in the education system, so they designed another system to fix the problem, which is called Special Selection. This system is to promote diversity within the academic field. The requirements are very strict, you need to prove that you have spent time on your interest and have produced something from your learning. For example, if you want to register for the department of foreign languages, you should at least have some related experience such as your notes of reading literature or some related Certificates of merit. But mostly your certificate is not your main reason to gain admission. The thing the professor wants to see is only how much effort you have put into pursuing your dream and how much courage you take to be yourself. This system has helped thousands of special students to fulfill their dream, which proves to be impressive. But most of the students are still left behind in our flawed educational system. The Special Selection could be a wind of change in the field of academia, but more efforts need to be put into this project. The system is easy to change, the only thing that will take time is for people to accept it.

責任編輯：李佾學 核稿編輯：鄒宇晴