Opinions from the Front Page Sections, translated…
From the very first English Listening Skills Exams on October 21, the annual college entrance scans had, begun. The parents, in the competitions for higher education, their attendance and involvements, as you can imagine, by how they’d accompanied their young to the examinations, waiting outside the classrooms, giving them foods and drinks in between the exams. The parents in Taiwan had been avid in the elementary, middle school years’ afterschool talent and cram school sessions, even to planning out their children’s volunteer involvements too. All the way up to the schools their young are to apply to in the colleges and universities, what extracurricular activities the children are involved in, this was the situation of “overparenting” in the book “How to Raise an Adult”.
The writer, Julie Lythcott-Haims, who was once, a dean of freshmen of Stanford University, she’d mentioned, that as parents raised their children by protecting them completely, setting up the opportunities in their young’s lives, like the helicopters, and succumbing to the deranged game of entrance exams, the children had already been stripped of their freedom of intelligence, their emotions too; being deprived of their own ability to survive independently, it’d caused psychological damages, the children wouldn’t have the opportunities, to learn to how to be a human being.
But because we’d all loved our own young wrong, with the tilted beliefs of what’s right from that sense of vanity, of fear, that is why, the problems in education remained unresolved, the middle schoolers’ depressions leading them to self-mutilate, the college students’ hurting each other in love, it’d made people feel awful, just awful!
I’m quite confused, that a school’s keeping a student safe, shouldn’t it be more important than the grades of the tests, and the entrance rate into universities, along with the schools’ placements internationally? And, can the parents, the educators, continue to blind themselves, to these situations?
In order to prevent the preparations of school competitions from getting to the kindergarten years, the childhoods were, borrowed away cruelly, I hope, that the universities and colleges in Taiwan can have the mercy, the courage, and the wisdoms, to use the applications systems.
So, consider this a plea, by an educator, to the way that things are running right now, and, because this system of entrance exams, and admittance into good schools based off of how high we can score on those pointless, useless entrance exams had been used since the beginning of time, even IF this system is to be changed, it won’t happen overnight, and heaven only knows, how many students will be sacrificed, along the way, by this imperfect system of education that we have in this country…
Life, the Obstacle Course 