Last Saturday night, I was talking to a group of friends (yes… I have friends outside of Forumosa!!!), and the topic of Taiwan’s education system came up. One of them mentioned how their kid is absolutely burned out from endless cram schools and test prep. It got me thinking…
Taiwan’s schools don’t teach you to think instead they teach you to memorize.
It’s like students are just machines being programmed to spit out answers, not to actually understand anything. Is this education or just the manufacturing robots to work in factories to pump out computer chips?
Kids in other countries (like Australia) finish school at 2:45pm and are learning life skills, gaining useful work experience and pursuing hobbies after school. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s kids are at school until 5:00pm… only to go onto their cram school where they finish at 9pm in some cases. All to just remember and repeat.
When I ask why they cheat so much in Taiwan universities they told me because they are tired of having tests everyday. The education system is not only harming creativity, social and sports, but is also creating dishonest citizens
I think thats a whole Asian thing not just taiwan. I remember spending most of my childhood going to cram schools too.
However in some regards, the education in taiwan is not as hard as some other asian countries.
Its still brutal and too hectic for sure especially for little kids
Every year the papers have stories about the top kids who get into NTU medical school. Typically, these kids don’t go to cram schools. Here’s just one of many examples.
This is largely the fault of the parents. The line about ‘he will get behind without cram’ is a dead giveaway for a well-intentioned but misguided parent who is pushing their child too hard. This is also a convenient excuse for using the cram school’s childcare function.
Taiwan’s parents are the problem. Not the education system.
I gotta tell you. They really do have next level rote memorization.
You are only supposed to be able to remember around 7 or so numbers in a row off the top of your head, so theres a technique using memorable connecting images to basically remember anything.
I tried to beat my gf with this technique to prove its worth. Well i couldn’t. She could match my list of numbers using rote memorization only and th3 list was getting so long i just got bored.
Can’t blame everything on the parents. They themselves are under the pressure from overburdened work life and don’t know how to handle the child when they are both working
Cheapest and easiest way is let the cram school handle it
They literally will fall behind without some form of outside support. Look at the English curriculum: on day one they learn a dialogue about “hi, what’s your name blablabla” and the letters Aa, Bb, Cc. Their homework is a bunch of writing from the dialogue. They have learned three letters but they need to be able to read and write a lot more than that. They’re tested on their ability to write complete sentences, from memory, two weeks later. At this point, they’re lucky if they’ve rammed through the first half of the alphabet. Their teachers feel zero obligation to actually teach them what they need to know in order to succeed. They only like and want to teach the kids who already know everything. The kids who don’t go to cram school (or get some other form of outside support) are set up to fail from the very first day of elementary school.
I think a huge new issue is that the Ministry of Education addressed this by shortening school hours. School is out by 12pm for public schools, and so much of the learning in a school day now is now privatized. For a 1st grader, you get 1 full day of school (8am-4pm) each week. 2nd grade means 2 full days, and not until 5th grade do you get 5 full days of school. When I spoke w/ a parent about this, he said that he was told because it was based on a Nordic/Dutch model. Otherwise, I’m not sure what the rationale was. Back in the 90s when I was in school in Taipei, it was 5 full days and a half day on Saturday. Delegating education to Anqinbans actually just makes education far more unequal. I’ve toured cheap ones that are just $13,000 NTD a month and cram 16 kids to a classroom that is more like a closet, it could fit 2.5 queen beds wall to wall at most. As you get up in price ($30,000-$50,000/month), the classrooms have fewer kids and there are far more opportunities for them to get teacher feedback. I unfortunately, had to put my kid in a cheap one when we were back for a summer because the premium places put a lot of weight on English instruction and yet the teachers barely spoke English. Not ideal either way. And this is for the parents who could afford anqinbans, and not just have their kids go home w/ grandparents. I don’t know if cutting the school day short was a cost saving device but it certainly does not mean that the kids are getting extracurriculars/sports/having any semblance of a well rounded education.
Or you can just wait till they’re 18 and send them to Canada or Australia to learn English for a couple years while giving them a trip of a lifetime and immersion. The amount spent on buxibans for what they get is appalling. Buxiban teaching IMO has terrible ROI.
I have kids in the system and they have been through multiple schools in different parts of Taiwan. Things ramp up to 90 quickly by junior high school.where the real craziness starts. Before that I would say they are doing a reasonable job in the elementary school system, I could recommend kids to attend a Taiwanese elementary school with little hesitation (or at least not discourage) , the medium sized town/countryside schools might even be the best.
The main problem I see is that the syllabus in the latter years of elementary school.and then junior high school is crammed together with too much content , even with their long school hours here.
They need to cut , cut , cut not add more, more, more. MORE IS NOT BETTER. You KNOW this MOE professors with PhD degrees in education so why do you still allow this to happen!
So the teachers are hard pushed to get the kids to keep up to the schedule to both deliver and learn the content. They rely on buxibans and anqinbans a lot to do the revision and help with homework and also pre-work before the new year.
Both elementary schools and junior high schools expect the kids to have already previewed the material when they start in day 1. This means the teachers then start rocketing through the material and tough luck if you didn’t know it or catch it.
The schools themselves are also not following MOE GUIDELINES asking the kids to come in early and sometimes stay late as well and using rest or reading time to do actual classes and tests. The MOE is ignoring the RAMPANT abuse of the standard school day period. The MOE is not doing their job properly in each county and city.
The maths they teach the kids is also insanely high level for young students in my honest opinion. I don’t think it’s necessary and it’s taking too much of their time. Let’s face it 95% of people are never going to use that maths again.
What the MOE and parents and buxiban are doing and their expectations are unrealistic and for the most part counterproductive.
They want the students to get top grades to get into the top schools so ALL students are pushed way too hard . Testing and more content and more testing.
They should separate out the kids into honours classes for streaming into Taida and leave the rest to have a semblance of a normal school life with some other more balanced project based activities. Do not steal 90% of children’s time for the 10% that would want to do this voluntarily.
What is the point of all the kids being pushed to the limit when ANY kid can get into a uni and only 1% or whatever are going to Taida. Parents are to blame for this aspect also.
And even if they go to Taida or another mediocre university within 5 years it hardly makes a difference because the ability to do a masters overseas or on the job experience will become more important. The social skills that they need to succeed in the real world are not being developed enough in schools due to too much focus and time still on content regurgitation and testing.
There are some improvements supposedly with non test based continual assessment point systems but fundamentally the system is still a throwback to the ‘throw more mud at the wall and the one who throws the most mud will have the best wall’ approach to life.
Final point is on class sizes. I read before that student/teacher ratio is THE key metric for quality education. Taiwan is a very rich country and should push to get the class sizes down to 20:1 teacher. After all the budget should be increased per student as the number of students has dramatically decreased. Elementary schools have 26:1 and lots of Junior highs still have 30:1 or more.
Taiwan you are a RICH country you can spend more on your rare kids . Air cons have gone into all schools but class sizes are still too big.
I wonder if the school system in Taiwan now recognizes and supports neurodivergent students more?
When I went to school in Taiwan in the 90s. It was brutal for me. Corporal punishment was allowed and I was punished daily as I had trouble learning from repetition and memorization.
My understanding is that yes it does. The Special Education Act has been completely revised three times since 1998 and there have been other frequent amendments. The main approach for mainstreamed neurodivergent students seems to be individual education plans (IEP; 個別化教育計畫).
Corporal punishment was allowed and I was punished daily as I had trouble learning from repetition and memorization.
Corporal punishment has been prohibited since the early 2000s. My understanding is that it is now unusual in public schools and incidents are often reported in the media and/or lead to lawsuits.
What’s even more interesting is that the government recently approved a bill to amend the Civil Code to reduce the scope of physical and other punishments that parents can impose on children.
Now of course the reality lags behind the law. But these legal changes do reflect changing norms in Taiwan that effects what happens in reality.
I think Taipei City is down to 23-24/students per class in ordinary elementary schools like Songshan, Wanfang, and Bojia. Looks like ‘famous’ ones like Xinsheng and Dunhua are up around 28 or 29.
It’s not, teacher quality is. Class size plays a role, but better to have a great teacher with 40 students than an awful teacher with 4. Class sizes, like certification, are inflated in value by unions and teachers.
