7 Challenges in Taiwan's Education System That 5IN Seeks to Address

Students graduating from the current educational system may be able to obediently listen and pass tests, but for the most part experience a great deal of trouble and pain when adjusting to the realities of life, adulthood, the professional world, and even their own personal world. The lack of experience in practical life processes is creating a generation which continually matures at later and later ages, being ill equipped to communicate, cooperate, and act as responsible and contributing individuals in society. Even more alarmingly, many youth today have difficulty understanding themselves, setting their own goals, and being able to chart and establish their own identities in the world.

While the bulk of Taiwan's industry currently lies in the tertiary sector of service, the general consensus is for a concerted effort to push towards the quaternary sector (knowledge economy sector). With Taiwan's limited natural resources and decreasing population, this attempted shift is a logical one. The knowledge economy requires individuals with abilities in areas such as research, IT, design, data analysis, and education. Unfortunately, traditional educational models mainly train and measure pupils against the ability to accumulate and remember content knowledge, a simple function which a search engine is more than sufficient for. The result is a population which has only been prepared to follow orders, not to create and contribute in the quaternary sector.

Taiwan aims to become a fully bilingual country by 2030, an endeavor which must be supported by an excellent language learning and practice environment. Unfortunately, the understanding of language acquisition as simply another “subject” is a mistaken one, considering that language, culture, thought, values, and social realities are inexplicably intertwined, influencing and shaping each other with no clear division. Current models of education do not take this into account, resulting in a generation of students that may be able to perform on language tests, but fail at the real-world test of usage for communication and influence purposes.

Common educational models spend an egregious amount of time and energy pushing students towards tests and further schooling, with little attention paid to natural proclivities or actual utility. Youth are being prepared for the world of yesterday, not tomorrow. The results are a large population of consumers, accepters, and intellectually disinterested individuals. 

Current education systems are relics of the industrial age and designed for ease of teaching, not ease of learning. This makes for a low-quality match between instruction needed (wanted) and instruction received, resulting in poor effectiveness in the classroom with the majority of the student population under-engaged or disengaged with class activities.

Rigid curricula with specific content knowledge requirements require students and teachers to spend large amounts of time and effort on subject matter that does not have a clear connection to real life or real student personal goals, resulting in low interest, low engagement, low retention, and low utility.

Additionally, common methods of education too often divide learning into independent "subject areas", leading students to learn and think of knowledge as mutually exclusive and non-transferable. The end product of this education leaves students with little more than a set of random and useless content that is easily forgotten and of no practical use in life.

Traditional summative measures of student "achievement" often create environments where each individual is in constant competition with each other individual, a situation which should not actually be the normal reality for most of real life. This sort of “your win is my loss” thinking creates unhealthy mentalities regarding interpersonal relationships, and is often detrimental to happy environments in the classroom and at home. Test-heavy and grade-heavy educational systems encourage self-centric and zero-sum competitive mindsets, creating unhappy and ill-adjusted individuals who have difficulty in professional and social environments. A tendency for selfishness and disregard for public issues naturally arises, resulting in potential problems for society in the future. 

Traditional assessment standards often measure achievement and gauge student performance based on retention of discrete content knowledge, decoupling "success" from anything of actual value. Students focused on this narrow criteria often move further and further away from developing what is more commonly understood as "useful" abilities. On the other side, students who become disenchanted with the status quo of current educational content and metrics find themselves labelled as "failing" in their responsibilities and become alienated from the idea of applying themselves academically.

In response to the shortcomings of traditional academic measurements, "new" education unfortunately often frowns on formal assessment (especially quantitative), leading students to be unclear of their own growth and degree of improvement and thus losing a useful benchmark which also serves as one form of motivation for learning and work. Even more worryingly, some educational programs water down standards to the point that students are congratulated simply for "showing up" or "participating", giving students a very unrealistic idea of what actually passes as "satisfactory" performance, potentially setting up a whole generation for disappointment and maladjustment upon entering society and the real world.