Musings from classroom (ir)realities It is not easy to explain to someone from the West what is academically going on in many universities here in Taiwan. My friends from Western countries find the stories I am telling them about my college experiences hard to believe. I admit it is really difficult to imagine – if you grow up within an academic world quite common in Europe – how the idea of university can be perverted in such a dramatic way as it happens here in Taiwan on a massive scale. It is not even easy to understand that situation for Western adolescents. I do not wish to repeat the words my nieces – twins – used when describing what they saw in several of my classes to which I took them while they visited me a few years ago. They were bemused and shocked at the same time, wondering what was going on in this country as a whole if that what they saw was considered as education. They told me their classes back in Vienna (where they lived) were by far more demanding compared to what they observed here. Then, wicked as they are, my nieces made some remarks regarding my professional status, doubting whether I was still entitled to call myself professor. I have to admit I failed to diffuse their doubts. Maybe I should mention that at that time the twin sisters were twelve years old. What is going on in local universities is not just bad education – it is an educational disaster. Things have gone from bad to worse in recent years. Before I briefly explore this deplorable situation I wish to make a few remarks, anticipating thereby objections that one should not just look at the bad universities; the academic situation at the good schools here is very different. This may be true, indeed. Good schools have students with good academic attitudes and qualities, not necessarily good teachers: Good students can always have ‘fun’ with bad teachers, but good teachers can never have ‘fun’ with bad students. I have met quite a few open-minded, intellectually able young people who attend some of the so-called elite schools – but not only there. Yet many of them have an educational background that has been strongly influenced by ideas and study habits that come from outside the local learning culture. But there are not many of such good schools in Taiwan; and it is an illusion to believe that all public universities here are good schools. The deplorable academic level at Taiwan’s universities has become a rule, not the exception.Note that the university where I work is ranked by some rating agencies highly above the average among Taiwan’s institutions of higher education. So we are talking about the future middle class here on this island. Of course university ranking is a dubious business. But this is another topic. Of course university ranking is a dubious business. But this is another topic. So: What is going on in classrooms in such average schools in Taiwan? Probably most ‘impressive’ for someone who is used to a different academic climate is that apparently more than half of the students sit in classes just for the sake of sitting there. There seems to be no other obvious purpose when observing them. In fact, they often themselves don’t know why they are there; it’s just because their family told them to do so. Their academic performance often makes you ponder whether you are in a university or working in an institution with the task to contain (and entertain) mentally handicapped people, who are seemingly incapable of conducting mental operations needed to understand a problem that goes beyond the matching of colors or items. Don’t have the illusion that I am exaggerating. Nothing academically relevant can attract the attention of this dormant majority, no matter what they study and who their teacher is; the better the teachers, the more they fail. Their total lack of interest in anything that happens in class is palpably radiating from their presence across the classroom, gradually condescending on anything within reach that moves. How would you teach such mental tombstones? Unfortunately, the moribund atmosphere they create in class affects those who are willing to learn. Teachers, therefore, must protect the willing minority from the unwilling majority. One way of doing this is to ask those not interested to leave. A very few teachers including myself do that. The consequence is that most students leave class indeed. But now real teaching can begin. I think that the schools should encourage such an attitude. But: Do they? Schools which accept such students (pretend to) believe that their classroom habits can be changed. There are trials in this direction, often in form of concrete measures initiated by the Ministry of Education (MOE). But most of these measures are nonsensical, because those bureaucrats of education seem to believe that the main problem of a failing education is the teacher who fails to motivate students. So the MOE ‘helps’ universities to improve the performance of teachers by spending millions of dollars to create for instance so-called teaching excellence programs, apparently believing that the enhancement of good teaching is a matter of money. But it does not work in this way – it doesn’t work at all. What happens in such programs is that the same trash is repeated twice, this time, however, with the help of extra funding by the government. What is urgently needed instead is a change of prevailing paradigms of education. Nobody from the government seems to come across the idea that the main culprits of this educational malaise are first the students themselves, and second the local culture. How can teachers possibly help students who do not want to help themselves? Perform miracles?; by attending special classes about self-improvement held by paid ignorami who regurgitate silly truisms such as ‘be nice to students’ or ‘you have to motivate students’?; by filling in millions of forms about improvement strategies (in which at the end everybody tells anything whatever MOE wants to hear, for the next funding is around the corner)? This, among others, is what really happens. Of course there are bad, even lousy teachers here in Taiwan – even quite a few of them, in my opinion. But they would never change in that way, because such silly administrative attempts do nothing but cater the silly habit that just being present in any of those silly programs is all that is needed to fulfill one’s duty – and that’s it. In this aspect, bad teachers are not different from bad students. Good schools encourage their teachers to intellectually challenge their students as much as possible: Students have to adjust their attitudes to the highest demands of the teachers, not the other way round. Bad schools are those who hold teachers responsible for the failure of their students; the consequence often is that they go down (or are already there anyway) with the level of teaching for the sake of pleasing students and school administrations alike – hence bad schools. But it is not the job of a teacher to please students. Schools should know what they want to be: good or bad schools. If they want to be bad schools, then they should announce their de facto policy in public. It is, second, the Confucian culture as such that hampers the development of young people’s sense of responsibility toward oneself. Education here hammers into the brains that you are permanently responsible toward others, be it grandma at home or the teacher at school. Tools of control are mind-killing family values at home, and an inundation of superfluous exams at school respectively. This prevailing culture here is extremely anti-intellectual and anti-academic; it treats young people like Peter Pans who never (should) grow up. But responsible people need to know by themselves why they are doing what they are doing; education must go in this direction. Such a state of mind would avoid the colonization of classrooms with students who are lost in a modern, globalizing world. The dominating culture here, in contrast, is good for survival in a village ruled by tribes, and located in a remote rural area that has not been discovered yet. A government in Taiwan that takes education seriously needs courage to criticize its own culture for failing its young people. But expectations for such a courageous act are not high – what would you expect from officials who grew up under the same educational and cultural paradigms which are the cause of today’s disaster.
Posted on: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 09:10:27 +0000
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