Kindergarten laws

I only brought up privates because of Satellite’s constant lecturing on kindy teaching. They’re both illegal. I don’t think there is a big risk in either of them despite his lectures. Although I don’t do either but that’s partly because I’m not interested in teaching kindy regardless of the legalities.

I do agree that there is a slight risk in teaching kindy. However, Sattelite just likes to stir the pot.

Whole Lotta Lotta: I think you’ve maligned him. I’ve never seen him do that. Frankly, it would be out of character of him.

By stir the pot, I only meant he likes to get people riled up and maybe talking. I did not mean I think he will go out and report illegal teachers.
I do think kindy teachers get maligned. In these boards, they get compared to drug dealers and others who commit much worse crimes. Many are good people who have made a slightly risky choice.

It’s actually more the former than the latter. It is malicious, but it has nothing to do with you. The kindergarten law is deliberate and calculated and has absolutely nothing to do with education or children. It has more in common with a tariff on steel than sound pedagogical policy. The law does these things:

  1. Protects Taiwanese teacher’s jobs: Taiwanese vote and foreigners don’t. Consider that in the 2002- 2003 school year kindergartens (both public and private) enrolled 240,000 students. In the 2008-2009 school year, they enrolled only 185,000. The loss of 55,000 students over that time period resulted in the loss of 3,085 full time kindergarten teaching jobs-- that’s 1.4 jobs per day, everyday, for six years. 0% of these jobs were in public kindergartens, so every foreigner hired in a private kindergarten increases this job loss number even further.

  2. Drives salaries down. Demand decreases without supply decreases, so wages go down. Some people work illegal jobs which also pay less than legal ones. Ask a teacher who’s been in Taiwan for 10 years or more how wages have moved.

  3. The perceived and actual cost of raising a child goes down. Early childhood English lessons are like an academic arms race where everyone is “keeping up with the Jones”. The more expensive it is (or is perceived to be) to raise a child, the more downward pressure is placed on the birthrate which is already the lowest in the world. Anything that can be done to alleviate this is done.

  4. It creates a permanent underclass. The richer you are or the more political power you have, the less this law means. The rich can go to experimental public schools, or international schools, or hire private tutors, ect. The local kindergarten in the small town where I live costs just over $4,000 a month and had to change their name a few years ago to remove “bilingual” from it even though they had only moderate amounts of English in their curriculum and no foreign teachers. The bilingual school I drive past on my way to work costs over $120,000 per semester and has a multi-story kindergarten building on campus that operates with impunity with a full staff of foreign teachers. The rich kids hit elementary school reading English at or above grade level while the poor and middle class kids are learning the alphabet from a teacher that barely knows it. Individual success may vary, but in the aggregate they never catch up and never compete for coveted spots at the best high schools or universities. This creates a permanent underclass that benefits the people making and paying for the law.

You are right that incompetence is generally a good bet when trying to understand the MOE. They have brought higher education system in Taiwan to the brink of ruin and rarely act in the best interests of students or educational policy, but this is generally because economics and bigger picture policy concerns trump educational concerns. Most of the same reasons above can be applied to other questionable policy decisions. For example, the policy requiring a certain number of days spent in a foreign country and limiting to a certain percentage the number of classes taught online in order to recognize a higher education degree has nothing to do with quality of education and everything to do with protecting Taiwanese universities from foreign competition when so many are already on the brink of closing due to having too few students. Why else would a country not recognize degrees from, say Penn State (probably the largest provider of online courses in the world) but willing to recognize degrees from 4th tier Taiwanese diploma mills? It’s an economic embargo not a pedagogical decision. This is why this issue is perennially on the American Chamber of Commerce’s list of unfair trade practices and calls for reform.

Often it is not that government policy isn’t carefully calculated; it’s simply calculated toward a very different end goal.

Are you sure it’s not a pedagogic decision?

Yes, the argument that it damages children’s minds and the development of their first language is complete farce.

Kindergarten teachers here should be subject to the same laws as foreign domestic helpers here are, seeing how most kindergarten ESL classes are more like day care centers than places of instruction, meaning kindergarten teachers have more in common with Indonesian and Filipino geriatric caretakers than with actual teachers.

I catch a lot of self-righteous talk, both on this forum and in day-to-day life on the island, from kindergarten teachers who feel that they’re not treated with respect or are underpaid for the work that they do. The fact is that none of the ones that I’ve met really deserved much respect, and personally I would be surprised if they could successfully impart any knowledge to anyone.

But most professional, licensed, and degree-holding K-12 instructors are, on average, intellectually unimpressive, so I wonder how much praise any instructor really expects for completing an Ed.M. degree that (with my proofreading) even my Taiwanese ex-girlfriend could complete with no prior education coursework.

I think Ermintrude might be hinting at the incompetence of most kindergarten teachers and the need to shelter children from that, not the profound nonsense that the MOE props up.

There is a lot of truth to what you are saying. There is too little oversight, too few safeguards, no background checks. I think all of these should be addressed. There is no reason why someone who would have to pass a background check to work with children in their own country should be able to move to another country and do it without one.

There are also and a lot of pedagogically bad kindergartens. Unfortunately though, they don’t stop being bad kindergartens the moment they bar foreigners from them-- to say nothing of the fact that barring Taiwanese teachers from teaching English seems bizarre if their real goal were only to keep unqualified foreigner teachers out. Protecting children from incompetent programs is best addressed through regulation rather than banning English-- which is what the MOE does at every other level from elementary school to college, so why the change in kindergartens if this were their primary goal? Besides which, if you banned students from every school with incompetent pedagogies you’d cut a wide swath from kindergarten to graduate school. The “protecting children” line is convenient, but the real reasons are economic, political, sociocultural.

Show me a pedagogically GOOD, Taiwanese-run school and I will show you dark matter.

There are a lot of good reasons not to give young kids bilingual or all-English education if they don’t live in a naturally bilingual environment, particularly if you want them to develop bilingually or multilingually in the languages of their own country. It’s not necessarily that it’s bad for them (although it does tend to lead to really poor English, with a lot of fossilised error and poor pronunciation), it’s more to do with opportunity costs: they aren’t spending their very early childhood playing and developing skills, they are wasting their day learning rubbish that they could do quicker and easier when they are older.

Local language development is key for preschoolers also. Kids need to be grounded in their communities, hearing Hakka and Holo and other languages, not being hothoused inappropriately.

You may and probably do disagree. Of course, the economic, political and social reasons are there too. Don’t assume that the MOE are just muppets who haven’t consulted outside agencies or done research at all.

This, for me, is the key point. The bilingual kindy experience in Taiwan is nothing like a naturally bilingual environment. I’m pretty sure that the MOE know this too. The MOE cannot regulate kindys but they can refuse them the option of teaching English, which means that foreigner work visas can’t be issued.

Isn’t that what’s going on? The teaching approach in the majority of kindys is wrong, but the MOE are hamstrung.

Well, I guess they can’t force people to not send their kids to them, but by not giving official approval, they are at least not endorsing these kindies even if they are not censuring them. They know they exist and they may be beneficial to some kids such as those with English-speaking parents, but to endorse them by issuing work permits is not something they will do.

The problem is that the teaching approach gets worse as students move to elementary and jr/sr high school.

The MOE decision has absolutely nothing to do with the best educational approach. These same MOE officials almost for sure have their children in bilingual kindergartens probably with illegal foreign teachers. The MOE also has no interest in enforcing its own laws illegal kindergartens (fortress-like) are setup on every other street corner.

This is probably the most distressing thing that I know about immigration law in Taiwan. It’s a marvel there aren’t bunches of Swirl Faces hiding out here on the island!

I’ve misunderstood the laws, then. I gathered that kindergartens were legal businesses for Taiwanese citizens, but that they could not legally hire foreign instructors. Does this only apply to “bilingual” kindergartens?

That aside, markets need experimental environments in which to determine which pedagogical methods are effective. The buxiban industry, however, has a mixed system, because its primary concern is student retention, for which student performance (as it’s relevant to Taiwanese people, official test scores) is not a guarantor until the junior high school level. The only cases in which I’ve seen objective interest in verifiable improvements in English proficiency at the elementary level were among those students who were also enrolled in international schools, and for similar reasons. The closest remedy that I’ve seen for this predicament outside of Taiwan is through charter programs and private military and religious schools, which have to thrive on their reputations more than fully state-run schools do. That could outsource most of the MOE’s research needs and enable them to make educational standards based on the successes and failures of these various branches.

Only because they go to Cambodia, Vietnam, or Thailand. Taiwanese kids only get lucky because there are easier pickings nearby.

I will never understand why the Taiwanese government doesn’t demand a criminal record check. Just as I cannot understand why parents aren’t threatening to lynch their politicians for allowing it. Bizarre.

Just got a criminal record check to teach adults in China. Pretty obnoxious, tbh, but it’s their country, I guess. It always blew my mind that you need a police check to marry a consenting adult, but not to be left alone with children.

Ehopi, they are not supposed to teach in English or teach English for more than a certain amount of time, it’s not just about hiring overseas’ staff.

Interesting what you say about ‘experimental environments’: they would have some really good opportunities to do some research, if anyone gave a shit.

Like all political systems, legislation will only occur in snail-paced reaction to actual tragedies. Unfortunately, that means that there will have to be a sensationalized news story of a foreign ESL instructor raping children before anything is fixed, or so I would predict.

The cost of opportunity argument is generally the go-to argument for the MOE. I’d think it was a more credible argument if children were actually redirected into programs with the characteristics you outline, but they aren’t. My son attended a public kindergarten when he was 4 and 5. Of course he had play and recess, but they also spent most of the day sitting at a desk learning to write, ect. He had written homework every single school day for two years of public school kindergarten. For a child of four, that’s a long day, and it’s not a day filled with play and developing skills and rich activity. They were not exposed to Hakka, the most common dialect in the community, or any other dialect. I see way too much hypocrisy to take the argument seriously. The concern for the pedagogies practiced in kindergartens seems to mysteriously evaporate as soon as the question stops being about foreigners and/or English.

So take him out of the crappy kennels then!