[Editor's Note] Some Thoughts on "Top-Tier" Education

Not long ago, I attended a parent-teacher conference at Taipei's Jianguo High School. I'd figured that since the kids in question were of high-school age, most parents would have let go a little. Instead, I found parents in all 46 of the classroom's seats.

Over the course of the next two hours, parents repeatedly asked the teachers why their children had so little work. Why were their kids always fooling around? What were their tests covering? How were they being graded? The teachers answered patiently and repeatedly hinted that the parents didn't need to worry too much about these kinds of things. Finally, one parent couldn't take it anymore. "I know we shouldn't worry about this stuff," the parent exclaimed, "but if we didn't worry about this stuff, we wouldn't be sitting here today."

Everyone laughed, but the comment was spot on. In Taiwan, it's more likely to be parental diligence than childhood excellence that gets a child into a good school. Kids follow their parents' lead. The philosophy here is entirely different than that in, for example, Finland. There, schools avoid using the word "educating" because it implies hierarchy. Instead, they design their curricula from the student-centric standpoint of "learning."

But the really shocking statement was yet to come...

"I know that parents are concerned about their children's grades," the teacher went on. "I also know that all of the children here were at the top of their middle-school classes or even the top of their schools. But you need to set that standard aside here. When the kids finish their first round of exams, many are going to be upset about their class rank. They're going to have a sense of failure. Parents need to be very, very careful...."

Many years ago, I interviewed Chou Li-yu, a school principal who was an advocate for educational reform and the establishment of "school districts" for high schools. She argued that most of Taiwan's top-tier high schools excelled because they had outstanding students, not because the teachers were good. She thought it regrettable that we sent the top 1% of our students to a single high school in the expectation that it would provide them easy access to National Taiwan University.

All of which is just to say that most of what makes Taiwan's best schools so very good is their students, and that most of these students have been encouraged to excel by their parents. But parents can't watch over their children forever. If kids can't motivate themselves, they'll slack off as their academic careers progress. As in the fable of the tortoise and the hare, those who exhaust themselves too soon will finish poorly.

When reading this month's cover story on the Stars Program, imagine a poor child from a rural area, never pushed by parents or teachers and never encouraged by peers, who nonetheless ranks near the top of his or her age group. Surely society should cherish and encourage such children. Unfortunately, the Stars Program as it currently exists doesn't offer much help. Can the revised Southern Stars program provide more tangible assistance to disadvantaged children from rural areas? It may, but it needs all our help.

Clearly, the best thing to do would be to lower the age of the students which Stars targets. Rural areas have had a hard time creating prestigious high schools. While we can't relocate the schools, we can, with sufficient incentives, possibly persuade some teachers from elite urban schools to move to rural schools. Alternatively, we can provide excellent primary- and secondary-school students from rural areas with the opportunity to attend better schools.

Many of the articles in this issue of Taiwan Panorama touch on the question of how to foster the development of talent. A close look at the pieces on the Taiwanese professional Go community, on Tunghai University's Department of Architecture, and on Baptist minister Huang Tian-jen's unique curriculum reveals points of congruence and contradiction in their approaches to education. Alas, the answers on education remain anything but clear cut.