Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: 全國教育權益保障協會/Facebook
UNION GROUPS representing educators demonstrated on September 28th outside of the Ministry of Education, marking Teachers’ Day, which is commemorated that day.
Specifically, the unions sought to highlight worsening labor conditions facing teachers. For one, the salaries and subsidies paid to educators today have not kept pace with inflation and rising costs. Likewise, educators are increasingly facing more and more time bogged down with administrative work, leading to less time spent in the classroom and mentoring students. To this extent, a shortage of teachers has resulted in teachers increasingly having to take on interdisciplinary roles.
Testing was highlighted as a major area of concern, in that almost all teachers in a school sometimes have to work during heavy test periods. This also results in teachers having to work on holidays, without receiving days off in compensation.
Moreover, teachers have sought to highlight a rise in frivolous lawsuits directed at teachers. Such lawsuits cost time and energy. They may also be aimed at driving teachers out of the system rather than anything productive. School councils were highlighted as particularly prone to targeting teachers.
Current regulations in which individuals with industry experience can easily qualify for teaching after eight credits, were highlighted as leading individuals focused on education to be shunted aside. It is thought that this is one of the factors that has led to a departure of teachers, contributing to the administrative duties that need to be handled by remaining teachers.
Educational mandates from the government were also highlighted as disconnected from the day-to-day life of teaching. Indeed, this was perhaps most visible in past years during an ill-thought-out push from the government to shift toward bilingual education without building up the necessary talent pool in order to do this, and with little consideration of the challenges that would ensue if such changes were implemented without sufficient direction.
Photo credit:全國教育權益保障協會/Facebook
As such, the government was called on to strengthen support and protections for teachers, to reduce the amount of administrative burden, and to curb frivolous lawsuits by increasing transparency regarding complaints. Salaries are to be raised, manpower is to be increased, and efforts made to make teaching a safer environment.
That teachers face increasingly worse labor conditions, leading to a departure of teachers, is not specific to the education industry. This has also taken place in past years in the medical industry, with a historically unprecedented wave of departures of nurses.
This proves ironic, when education and medicine were traditionally thought of as stable jobs in Taiwan with notable social prestige. Teachers were paid generous pensions and cultivated as social elites in authoritarian times, so that the KMT could maintain control of the education system. In a similar vein, Taiwan’s brightest have traditionally been trained as doctors, going back to the high social position that doctors enjoyed in the Japanese colonial period. Historically, this has led doctors to be overrepresented in Taiwanese electoral politics.
It is to be seen if there is any genuine push for reform of the education system. One notes that the issue received bipartisan support, with legislators of the KMT and DPP alike appearing at the demonstration. Still, perhaps challenges faced by teachers are also broadly reflective of those faced by Taiwanese as a whole at present.