Well, this “accelerated” idea doesn’t just happen in so-called bilingual schools. Even regular public schools try to be “better” than other schools in the area at times by forcing more work on students, but not supporting students on the basics. You see this in all the speech contests and readers theater and school sports and such. Each class has a small handful of kids that are carefully trained to be perfect in that one thing while the rest of the class is overlooked and not given any sort of opportunity to even try. Thus, they don’t get any support either. And they literally cannot do the thing the school is known for if their life depends on it.
“Accelerated” programs are stupid and shouldn’t exist anyway, public or private. Kids with loud parents that insist their child is better than everyone else when they are not able to do a lot for themselves get their kids into them all the time. The rest of the kids are only “good at things” because, again, opportunity at home and other places outside of school. The real problem with school is that it’s mostly lecture and then fill out this worksheet/workbook based. Very few people thrive in that environment. But then we create “accelerated” programs so those that can do that kind of mindless work can get to do experiments and work with manipulatives and learn coding and stuff “because they’re bored because this stuff is too easy for them”? And those that can’t do more workbooks and worksheets or even just copy answers from someone else to please the people at the top. Maybe we should stop lecturing as our main form of education?
I doubt cram schools are supporting the students who go to bilingual schools and are therefore skip the random selections of vocabulary from PE and art. They’re too busy teaching complex grammar patterns and low frequency words sans Chinese translation/context…
I would say the real problem is that most of how most education is run is based on made up crap nonsense and not reliable, measurable data/ replicable studies. Go read the Bilingual 2030 Plan. They do not actually say how they will teach english, only that they will. They don’t talk about doing before and after assessments on english skills, only say they want some tiny fraction of senior high school kids to “reach B2 or C1”. If I submitted a research plan like that when i was in high school, i would have failed the assignment. You would think we could expect better from professionals, but there is zero respect for the field of education unless you’re a mega corporation pushing highly profitable to you programs that, again, are not based on real data (or if you’re any of the publishers in Taiwan).
Growing up, a lot of stuff in education (in the US even) were just busy work. Most of the knowledge we learned weren’t even relevant to us later in life at all. It seems to be a rather common denominator all over the world. I believe Japan is even worse, with the student’s lives regulated down to minute detail. If I hated US school system (it was also authoritarian and overbearing) I would hate Taiwan/Japan system even more.
In my experience, the classes that had the most impact to my life have been shop classes (for those who aren’t American, these are classes where you learned to use tools, and make stuff), sadly in the US these classes have been cut down to nothing. I do not know if Taiwan even has them at all.
The entire academic system is complete crap. People come out of college with no practical skill that is of any use to employers whatsoever. We need better vocational training in school. Taiwan hasn’t gone with the “no child left behind” BS that the US engages in, but it’s also unhealthy for children, and makes parents not even want to entertain the notion of having one.
A huge difference between the US education and Taiwans is that it’s totally dependent on the teacher. A teacher in the US can look at a school-issued textbook/workbook and say “this is busywork. I know something that would meet the target actually” and no one is going to come after them about how every single student didn’t fill out every single page of every single textbook and workbook. We barely cracked open our textbooks when I was in elementary school. We weren’t even allowed to write in them (or the workbooks, when there were any). We used a lot of loose leaf paper (easily lost ) and mostly did worksheets/projects that teachers found that were relevant to the topic in question.
Here, teachers have to make sure not only that 100% of every textbook and workbook is filled out, 100% of the answers need to be correct or else the admin will come after the teacher for “not teaching the content”. Now, does this mean that plenty of US teachers fail to meet basic learning targets? For sure. But there is so much busywork that is required in TW’s schools, there literally is no time to actually teach the content. That’s what cram schools are for, or something.
) and mostly did worksheets/projects that teachers found that were relevant to the topic in question.