Taiwan Today

In Taipei, Wego Private School enjoys a wonderful reputation—every parent knows of it. No less prestigious is its affiliated kindergarten. “We even have a fifteen-hectare farm in Yangmingshan,” says Wego principal Chen Ching-kuei (陳清貴). “We use it as a ‘natural classroom’ for our pupils, from kindergarten through high school. It has a vegetable garden, a flower garden, animals. Pupils get to go on field trips once a month. They can grow vegetables, keep fish, ride ponies, and learn about nature.” And once they are back in the classroom, with its air conditioning, video recorders, TVs, and cassette players, pupils can study Mandarin, English, cooking, and computers, or enact role-plays, such as “At A Con­venience Store,” that have been designed to enhance their social skills.

So it is small wonder that competition to enter the kindergarten should be stiff. This year, no less than 638 children were entered for the annual drawing of lots that determines who will become entitled to the 293 places in the kindergarten’s ten junior classes. “The admission rate is 46 percent,” Chen notes with satisfaction, and this despite the fact that the kindergarten is far from cheap: US$1,090 for registration and $365 for refreshments per semester.

Parents have different reasons for sending their children to kindergartens. Some, like mother of three Ying Shu-yu (應淑玉), do it to help them get along with their classmates in primary school. Others want to prevent their kids from staying at home all day watching TV. But many par­ents, with a keen eye on their offspring’s future academic performance, are just con­cerned to give their children a head start. They know that their kids will have to compete in a society where only some 30 percent of candidates pass the senior high­ school entrance exams, and they will do whatever it takes to ensure that their own children succeed. It is these parents who generate the fierce competition for the Iim­ited number of places at Wego and simi­lar establishments.

So what options are open to them? Tina Liaw (廖鳳瑞) is an associate profes­sor at the Graduate Institute of Home Economics Education, National Taiwan Normal University, and since 1993 she has also been the principal of an experimental kindergarten affiliated with NTNU. Accord­ing to her, Taiwan’s preschooling is modeled on the Japanese system, which classifies preschool institutions as nurseries or kindergartens. Nurseries cater to children aged between one month and six years. Defined as child-care organizations, they come under the joint jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior and the social affairs departments of local governments. Their main function is to take care of children while their parents are at work, and only a few of them offer structured classes.

Kindergartens, on the other hand, pro­vide preschool education and are available to children four to six years old. Respon­sibility for them is shared by the Ministry of Education (MOE) and the education de­partments of local governments.

The number of pupils that nurseries and kindergartens educate between them is relatively limited—approximately 24 percent of the population under six years old. According to most recent MOE statis­tics, Taiwan has some 3,250 public and private nurseries, catering to 220,00 chil­dren, and 2,580 kindergartens, attended by 240,370 pupils. Fewer than 35 percent of kindergartens are classified as public, and they educate approximately one quarter of the total kindergarten population.

An important decision facing parents at the outset is whether to send their child to a private or a public establishment. Many prefer public kindergartens. Funded by central and local governments, they are generally believed to have better-qualified teachers and superior facilities. They also have a policy of not requiring children to do homework. But above all, tuition at a public kindergarten is only about half that of a private one.

Some parents, however, see distinct advantages to private kindergartens. Many of them offer bilingual facilities and are regarded as desirable for precisely that reason. More important, such establish­ments are frequently affiliated with pres­tigious private schools and are thus in a position to offer a guaranteed place at pri­mary, middle, and high school without the tiresome necessity of entrance exams. Wego is a prime example. Parents natu­rally hope that such a coordinated program of education will pave the way for entrance to a renowned university.

Lin Su-chen (林素珍), a mother of three, falls into this category. She is not pre­pared to compromise on quality, and she considers cost to be of secondary impor­tance. At the recommendation of a relative, Lin sent her daughter to a private bilingual kindergarten that employs native English speakers as tutors. One semester will set her back US$2,500, about double the fees charged by an average private kindergar­ten and four times those of a public one.

Lin shrugs off the cost, being deter­mined to see that her children end up with something better than her own vocational high school business diploma. She sees foreign languages as crucial assets that add to an individual’s competitiveness in the job market, and she has little faith in the foreign language education offered by Taiwan’s high-school system. “Few high­ school graduates can speak English, even after studying the language for six years,” she declares. “I’m not satisfied with that. I want to expose my children to an English­ speaking environment from an early age, so that they can pick up the language with­out feeling pressured.”

But Ying Shu-yu sees things differ­ently. Only her eldest child attended a pri­vate kindergarten. The youngest has just graduated from the kindergarten affiliated with Taipei Municipal Chungshan Primary School. She much prefers public kinder­gartens to private ones. “Private kindergar­tens often teach young children writing and assign lots of homework, which is bad for kids,” she says. “Those places are more like businesses. When you visit them, they seem very warm and enthusiastic, but all they really care about is getting you to enroll.” And she highlights another problem that affects private kindergartens: The teacher drain at most private kindergartens is worse than at public kindergartens, and that’s not good for the kids.”

Attracting and keeping first-rate teachers is undoubtedly a problem for the private sector. Low salaries and work-related stress are major factors that cause teachers to quit their jobs. Lack of social standing is another. Kindergarten teachers are now required to be college graduates in pre­school education-related subjects, but many nursery teachers are only high­school graduates.

Kao Hsiu-wen (高秀汶), 25, has been teaching at the same nursery in Taipei County for more than seven years since she graduated from the child-care division of a vocational high school. Her starting sal­ary was US$655 a month, slightly more than the minimum monthly wage. Now she is earning US$1,020 a month. Her av­erage working day runs to about ten hours, with a two-hour lunch break, whereas the typical working day in a public kindergar­ten is only eight hours. “Several times I’ve thought of quitting because of the long working hours, stressful environment, and low pay,” she says. “But the principal here has been very kind to me. My wages are low, but I still get slightly more than some other teachers. So I stay.”

But Kao is the exception rather than the rule. Chan Mei-ying (詹梅英) is more typical. She wanted to become a teacher at the kindergarten her daughter attends, so she took an extension course on child care at Chinese Cultural University. “I hoped that by doing that I’d be able to take care of my daughter—it was purely out of self­ishness,” she admits. After completing the required twenty credits, Chan interned at a private nursery. She quit after a week.

“I discovered that to be a teacher you have to be equipped with all sorts of skills and knowledge,” Chan says. “It’s not an easy job. Most private kindergartens require their teachers to stay overtime, sometimes until seven or eight o’clock, when parents come to pick up their kids after work. That’s too much for me. At a public kindergarten, teachers get off work at around four in the afternoon.”

Lack of teachers is not the only thing worrying private kindergartens. They are also at the sharp edge of government educa­tion policies meant to cure Taiwan’s acute shortage of public kindergartens.The reason for that scarcity goes back many years.

In 1962 the government, noting that preschool education was not compulsory, canceled the budget for kindergartens affiliated with public primary schools. In that year, the number of public kindergar­tens plummeted from 338 to 277, and thereafter the numbers stayed low. But in 1993 the MOE conceived the Mid-Term Project for Developing and Improving Pre­school Education, through which it plans to raise the enrollment rate in kindergartens from the current 66 percent to over 80 per­cent by the year 2000, and open additional channels for preschool teacher training. The project calls for the establishment of more kindergartens affiliated with public primary schools and the construction of new, independent public kindergartens, especially in Taiwan’s more remote areas.

The project provides a cash subsidy of approximately US$11,000 for each new class and around $54,500 for each newly built kindergarten, although the amount varies with the source of the subsidy, central or local government. (Some local gov­ernments are cool about the plan, because the central government only helps subsi­dize buildings and equipment, leaving per­sonnel costs to be borne at the local level.) But the plan continues to be implemented, and the emphasis is almost entirely on the public sector.

The MOE’s move inevitably threatens the survival of some private kindergartens, especially the smaller, family-owned establishments already suffering from a downturn in the island’s economy. Tsai Ah-min (蔡阿敏), owner and principal of Sungchiang Kindergarten, is worried about the future. “Around 1986, when the stock market was at its height, we had more than two hundred pupils,” she says. “Now we have only eighty.” In an attempt to re­tain her school’s competitive edge she hired a professional PE instructor, enrolled herself in a Montessori training course, and even hired a part-time English tutor.

Tina Liaw of NTNU regards the MOE’s project as misguided. “I think the real prob­lem is how to make better use of existing resources and improve the quality of pri­vate kindergartens,” she says, “because favoring public kindergartens just costs more. A public kindergarten teacher can expect a starting salary of US$1,270 a month with retirement benefits, whereas a teacher in a private institution starts at around $727, and in some parts of the countryside that can drop as low as $655. There’s not much difference in quality, but you’re going to see a big difference in tuition fees.”

To push for reforms in preschool education, earlier this year Liaw and a group of academics and kindergarten principals and teachers founded the ROC Preschool Education Reform and Research Associa­tion. The association has a number of goals. It is urging the creation of a special agency, represented at all levels of government, that will have overall responsibility for preschool education, and it wants to see the 1995 Teachers Act applied to kinder­garten teachers, thus giving them greater job security. Other aims are a guarantee that the salary of a teacher in the private sector will be not less than 80 percent of that of a public kindergarten teacher, and increasing preschooling’s share of the central and local education budgets. The association has also proposed draft amend­ments to the Preschool Education Act.

The association has long-term plans to branch into research. “Until now, there has really been no research on how learning English and computer skills affects pre­schoolers in Taiwan,” Liaw says. “We hope to do it. But at the moment we’re short of funds.” (The association is mainly financed by membership fees and dona­tions from its members.) She is aware of the further difficulty that education authorities are wary of being associated with any non-government organization that has the word “reform” in its title. “But preschool education is vitally important,” she stresses. “During the period from birth to six years old, children build up habits that will govern their learning later on.”

Given the vital importance of preschool education, many observers find it surprising that at present each kindergarten is free to design its own curriculum and chose its own teaching materials and meth­ods—Montessori, Froebel, Piaget, “inter­est corners,” theme teaching, and many more. In 1987 the MOE did prepare some general guidelines on the goals of kindergarten education—health, games, music, work, language, and common sense concepts of nature, society, and numbers—but these hardly amount to a core curriculum, and many schools feel free to adopt an experimental approach.

The kindergarten of which Tina Liaw is principal is a case in point. It places minimal emphasis on teaching as traditionally understood. “The most important thing is not how much knowledge a child acquires at kindergarten, but how far that kid is able to master self-confidence, trust, and the basic skills needed to handle daily life,” Liaw says. “About three years ago, when I first came here, we began to introduce open education, which is humanistic and child­-oriented. The teachers observe and assist, rather than teach. They stimulate kids to think for themselves and solve problems.”

Perhaps inevitably, given this back­ground, much curriculum development is consumer-driven, and sometimes it is par­ents who end up playing the decisive role. This is particularly true of language learn­ing. In the 1920s the government promoted a system of phonetic symbols to help chil­dren with pronunciation, commonly known as bo-po mo-fo. The symbols also function as an alternative system of nota­tion for spelling words before pupils learn to write Chinese characters. Parents natu­rally like their children to learn bo-po mo­-fo at an early age. In primary school, first-graders study it during the first ten weeks, and writing practice is only introduced after that. But parents of kindergar­ten-aged children often demand training in phonetic symbols and writing.

Wego principal Chen Ching-kuei sees this as a serious problem. “The difficulties we have with parents who demand writing practice arise because there is no common curriculum for preschool education,” he notes. “If we had one, the kindergartens could not be forced to teach children writ­ing before they’re ready.”

Tina Liaw is also unhappy with par­ents who try to influence the curriculum. “It shows that people don’t really respect this profession,” she says. “You wouldn’t tell a doctor what medicine to prescribe, because you respect him as a professional. Preschool teachers should get the same kind of respect when it comes to the cur­riculum.”

One area where parental input has come to assume particular importance is “talent classes.” These are extracurricular,and usually take place during the lunch break, although some parents send their children to them after they finish regular school for the day. Available subjects include piano, drawing, mental arithmetic, abacus, pottery, English, and computer skills. An increasing number of private kindergartens and nurseries have started to offer these classes in recent years, hoping to become more competitive. Each subject costs around US$35 a month.

Some people worry about the addi­tional pressures that these classes place on children, but Tsai Ah-min of Sungchiang Kindergarten, who has forty years of experience in preschool education, regards them as valuable. “I like my pupils to be exposed to many different things,” she says. “It’s like giving children seeds. Given the right environment, those seeds will one day sprout.”

With so much input from so many quarters, it is hard not to have some sym­pathy for the MOE. The ministry’s own perspective on the problems of preschool education does not necessarily coincide with that of parents and principals. Lan Shun-teh (藍順德) is director of the MOE’s elementary education department. When asked to name the biggest current problem with preschooling, he says: “There’s a large gap between what society regards as a good kindergarten and what educational theorists regard as a good kindergarten. Parents want the schools to teach their kids Chinese, spoken and written. They think if they don’t learn how to write, they won’t be able to catch up with their peers at primary school. Preschool education theorists agree that children between the ages of three and five shouldn’t be using their underdeveloped muscles to write. Yet 80 percent of kindergartens teach writing.”

Why is that the case? Lan’s answer is a succinct, penetrating analysis of what many people see as the fundamental weakness not just of Taiwan’s preschooling but of its entire educational system: the central role played by exams that are little more than tests of memory. “Our society puts too much emphasis on knowledge acquisi­tion,” he says. “From primary school on, people think that advancing to the next highest level is the most important thing. To do that, a candidate has to pass exams based on knowledge; but that knowledge is nothing but fragmented memories.”