Sirs,
Although your reporting on developments at the Ministry Of Education can never come a moment too soon, isn't it somewhat late for opposition legislators and academics to criticize the Ministry Of Education's most recent proposal for another history course revision?
Consider even today, before this terrible "brainwashing" occurs, how many Taiwanese students know that large scale Chinese settlement in Taiwan was initiated by the Dutch? How many Taiwanese students today can list the significant scientific, technological, economic or cultural achievements of Taiwanese people under Qing rule from 1683 until 1860? How many Taiwanese students today are aware of the historical importance of Taiwan to the development of plastics during the mid-1800s? How many Taiwanese students today are aware that Qing governor Liu Ming-chuan had to rely on British and German chief engineers for the construction of Taiwan's first railway - engineers whom, it must be said, the governor himself regarded as "foreign devils" and whose contracts he refused to honor? How many Taiwanese students today are aware how much of Taiwan's modernization from the 1970s onward was made possible by the cooperation of Taiwanese people with "foreign devils" rather than with "the vast and rich culture" of the People's Republic Of Mass Murder, Thought Control, Bribery, Slave Camps, Extortion & Theft?
I submit that this entire dispute over who gets to teach what in the classroom is akin to an unseemly scramble around the lip of the cauldron. None of these quick-handed people have any rightful business fondling the door handle to a classroom.
The solution to this problem is to free the education market from State control. With the free availability of an untold wealth of information and expertise online, the entire premise of a school as a physical location in which "teachers" impart "knowledge" to students has been undercut. What this episode reveals is that the school is now, more obviously so than at any previous point in history, fast becoming nothing more than a naked tool of political thought control, chiseling away at the minds of Taiwanese children.
The freedom of homeschooling, private schools for Chinese, English and Mathematics, and private, for-profit institutes of higher learning and examination are the rightful alternatives to this disgraceful sham.
Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.
(Sent Thursday 16th September 2010. Unpublished by the Taipei Times).
Note for regular readers: I deleted the post on Rawson below because I simply cannot stand the sight of it; I find it demeaning to even think about that treacherous oaf and his Chinese hook-ups up in Taipei. I will get around to him good and proper eventually.
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