From the incident of high school students, dressed up as Nazis for the Christmas celebrations, from the Front Page Sections, translated…
The private Guan-Fu High School students dressing up as Nazis at the Christmas parade had caused the upheavals in the society, and led to the questioning of history education in Taiwan.
The principal of Zhongzhen High School in Taipei, Chien pointed out, that the teachers are all, limited by the hours of classes, and a lot of the lessons were rushed through the given time slots, causing the lessons to be on the events, and NOT taught the students to understand the meanings of depth of these events in history, and it’d not helped the students to understand how this period in history came to form, to establish their own perspectives on the events in history.
Chien said, that there are multiple levels of history education, that in the end, it’d still needed to get connected with life, to make the changes, but, there’s only limited time slots for each of the lessons, and this, was the new curriculum’s focus for the future too.
And, she’d also believed, that having the open activities in the lesson planning, with the students taking the initiatives in learning, the instructor should lead the whole class in discussions over the projects the students wanted to do, and to see if everything is fitting.
“Ambivalence is way worse than ignorance”, the professor of Electrical Engineering of N.T.U., Yeh, stated, these students, either that they’d not been educated on the history of Nazis, not knowing the truth about the Nazis, otherwise, they wouldn’t have discussed about the whole class, dressing up as Nazis. The problem in education here, is that the focus is solely on the knowledge, that Hitler, the Nazis, committing genocide on the Jews, are nothing more than something we needed to memorize in our history texts, to pass the exams, that it’d lacked that empathic connection for the students to relate to the matter.
Yeh said, that there are too much the teachers needed to cover, that they’d needed to, effectively, stuff the materials to the students to digest, “feelings, empathy, are both luxuries in a classroom setting.” Causing the students here, to only have the facts of knowledge, but NOT feel anything toward the knowledges, that, was why the students had, dressed up as Nazis, and damaged the feelings of other races of people on what happened.
But, Professor Yeh also stated, that the society of Taiwan also needed to retrospect, that in the past, there are members of the online community that used footages of Hitler to make fun, and this action, like the students, dressing up as Nazis, are both shows of disrespect toward the cultures of other nations, “As adults, should we also NOT think, if we’d looked upon the histories of other nations seriously too?”
So, this professor is believing, that the students were merely, copying the older generations’ behaviors, of being insensitive about other people’s cultures, and, he may be right, because our system of education IS flawed, and, there’s simply NOT enough time, to get the students to LEARN the facts and what those facts of history mean, and that, is something that needs to be worked on for the education realm in the future.
Life, the Obstacle Course 