The China Post wrote about this video a week ago, it went viral worldwide it seems, but not much talk about it in Taiwan proper or in Chinese language media in Taipei. I think the teachers were just having fun. No harm done. Sure got the kids laughing!
China Post expat paper headline last Saturday was headlined ''SCHOOLTIME FOR HITLER" and began “DAYS AGO IN TAOYUAN AN EXPAT SPAT BROKE OUT OVER A STUNT …” the text is not online for some reason but it did appear in print edition a week ago: chinapost.com.tw
ONE expat teacher COMMENTER in Taiwan said – ''I don’t understand why this ‘gas’ of a routine needed to be portrayed as hitler. It could just as easily have been bozo the clown, or papa smurf or yourself for that matter. You’re both two if the most highly regarded teachers that represent our company. You’re in positions to not only influence the minds if your students, but also model good teaching for less experienced teachers. I think trivializing hitler is neither hilarious nor the behavior of the ‘best teacher ever.’
THIS COMMENT was met with this rejoinder – ''Good grief, lighten up already. No one is trivializing Hitler. This is Hitler as buffoon, exactly as he SHOULD be portrayed. The kids were delighted. Their moral compass is fine. They survived dressing up as Satan for Halloween and they’ll survive this. ’
I actually found him to be very funny. Only issue is Hitler was from Austria, but I suppose that could have been debatable depending upon the point in time.
Don’t know where to start on how stupid and bad this is. I almost feel sorry for the clowns for the utterly impoverished lives they lead. Have you read the comments below? Poor stupid wee lads.
Shitty kids’ cram schools full of unqualified nutters influencing their kids. Why do Taiwanese people even tolerate it, let alone aspire to this?
Gloria is an extremely successful chain school in Taoyuan. People will continue to send their children there even after viewing this. Why? I’ve no fucking idea.
He got the kids excited and asking questions. That’s an achievement really. Probably could have used another personage from history but I don’t really think its a big deal.
Not a difficult or complex thing to do. A cram school teacher isn’t trying to engage Jean Paul Sartre on being and nothingness, just get a bunch of kids to talk. Anyway, the means don’t justify the end, as it were. It’s just crass and amateurish. You’d want that for your own children? To be trapped in a tiny windowless, room with a dishevelled kid in a T-shirt pretending to be Hitler?
Next class: knock knock jokes about the White Terror period and then Japanese occupation charades.
Well, one reason I would bring up the White Terror would be that Hitler is scary and viscerally painful to some people, but not to others, for fairly obvious reasons. I guess the teacher doesn’t find it offensive and the children, parents and school don’t, but by publishing it, he now has an insight into why other people hate that kind of crap. By teaching children foreign languages, he has a responsibility to realise that many people would be appalled and that by modelling that behaviour, he’s lending it a veneer of adult acceptability. Start that shit in the wrong part of the world and you’ll get fired, prosecuted, beaten up or more likely, dismissed as a simpleton.
It’s easy to do the slapstick thing in class for easy points. It just looks arse-clenchingless amateurish and teacher-centred, aside from the normalising genocidal murder of entire races aspect.
Maybe it’s just because I’m Jewish, but I find this quite offensive, not because Hitler should never be made fun of (and actually the guy seemed kind of humorous and I’d probably not be offended at all if he did an adult version… but not in front of young, impressionable students.) Very few of the children in that classroom, in the course of their school education, are going to get a competent explanation of what Hitler and his Third Reich really were. I know a few Taiwanese people who adore Hitler and make no secret of it (one of them has a Nazi flag hanging in his room…) and it’s not because they agree with his ideals – that would be a whole different problem – but because they don’t have any idea what Hitler stood for. Stunts like this don’t help.
Hitler gets sent up all the time, and from what I saw he was sending up the stereotypical Hitler. He’s making fun of him and reducing him to the little man he was (I’ve also read part of Mein Kampf…(it’s just a book written by a poor down and out with batshit crazy political ideas and a lot of poor little me’s thrown in). I’ve seen tonnes of British shows over the decades sending him up. People started mocking Hitler’s mannerisms prior to WWII! He was a distinctive character in history that is easy to take the piss out of. Now if the teacher focuses too much on Hitler and never does anybody else that would be weird.
The thing is there is a cultural locality to things. People are not so offended by Hitler here because he didn’t have much effect in this region, but they would be offended the Emperor Hirohito or a Japanese soldier or whatever.
Stalin killed 10s of millions of people and I think not many people would complain about a send up of him worldwide, but you wouldn’t do it in Poland I guess.
It’s a bit weird, but then again there are lots of weird teachers of all types, I’ve encountered much worse in my time.
You’ve described the typical buxiban class well. It is what it is. His choice of subject is probably poor, but there are FAR worse things that go on in schools. He’s not picking out kids for ridicule, he’s trying to engage them and get them to talk, he’s not ignoring them or droning on, he’s not giving them some mindless roteless exercise to fill in the time, he’s not loading them with homework, he’s not teaching them government propaganda or religion, he’s not beating them.
I just find the title a bit offensive…is it a deliberate pun? And I tend to agree with other posters in that it is not a good thing to trivialize Hitler to Taiwanese kids; it scares me how many people here do not get how evil the guy was.
Hitler-based humor starts with the assumption that we take it as read the guy was evil. If you asked these kids “was Hitler evil and if so why?” I doubt you would get any real answers.
