Current Curriculum:
- 1 semester Taiwanese history
- 1 semester Chinese history
- 2 semesters World history
- 1 semester Taiwanese history
- 1.5 semesters Chinese history
- 1.5 semesters World history
According to the proposals the reason for the change is thus:
... the primary aim of the proposed changes is to assist students in “understanding their own cultural roots and help create a sense of self-recognition.”
The DPP's response was that the KMT was attempting to re-sinicise Taiwan - according to them this amounted to evidence that the party was revisiting its authoritarian roots:
“In the path to democracy, history courses have been adjusted to gradually focus more on Taiwan, but this former authoritarian government continues to use crude measures to shove its Chinese roots into the [education system],” DPP spokesperson Lin Yu-chang (林右昌) said.
The KMT's defence was:
KMT Legislator Hung Hsiu-chi (洪秀柱), who is also a member of the committee (aptly named the Education and Culture Committee), said the KMT administration was simply trying to “rectify” the former DPP government’s “de-sinicization” policy. “Descendants should never forget their ancestors or the ancestors’ culture,” Huang said.
That's a red flag comment right there. To my mind, governments that engineer curriculums to consciously protect or engender a supposed continuity of imagined cultures are enthralled to a very insecure nationalism. Not forgetting your ancestors and their culture taken to its logical extremes would mean revisiting neanderthal culture in Europe starting with cave paintings found in France and elsewhere. They are, after all, my ancestors and the paintings were part (though function still undetermined) of their and my culture. Egyptians need to preserve the culture of the Pharaohs whilst Norwegians and Danes need to get back to their Viking roots.
Above all Huang's comments muster an epic fail when put to the litmus test: how many Taiwanese honor any one of their direct descendants outside of the previous four generations? How many even know who their ancestors are and what culture they had except in very generalised and simplified terms?
Nevertheless, "Minister of Education Wu Ching-chi (吳清基) urged the public to respect the expertise of academics who drafted the guidelines rather than “appeal to political ideology."
So, increasing the content of Chinese history is not a product of political ideology but complaining about it is. The public should respect the expertise of academics and not complain whilst their children are subjected to crude attempts to re-engineer in the future voters an identification with China despite living in a country completely (de facto) independent of China.
This from a government that within a year had renamed the Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall to once again honor the brutal dictator of China and Taiwan and renamed the Taiwan Post Office (a perfect and sensible name) to Chinese Post Office, at great cost, in the name of ... wait ... political ideology. Hypocrisy doesn't often come so neatly and clearly as this.
My proposed curriculum:
- 2 semesters Taiwanese history
- 1 semester Asian history
- 1 semester World history
For those that complain that there is not enough material in Taiwan's history to cover two semesters I would say that 12,000 years of inhabitation and 400 years of recorded history are not enough material to draw upon? Given that a PhD student can spend 3 years studying just one aspect of one part of history, naysayers are guilty of a) a lack of imagination, b) a lack of knowledge of Taiwan's history and c) utterly beguiled by and immersed in the '5000 years of the great Chinese nation race' meme.
As one KMT staffer once told me, "the problem with the DPP is that they have such small aspirations. They only think about Taiwan but Taiwan is so small."
Nuff said.
