Making what the younger generations are learning, fitting to the needs of the changing faces of society, from the Front Page Sections, translated…
Taiwan is slowing marching toward an elderly society, and it’s estimated, that eight years from now, it will enter the aging elderly society. The caretaking of elderly, the reduced birthrates, the decline in competitive labor forces, will hit the society one by one. It’s estimated, that due to a decline in birthrate, there would be sixty colleges and university that close down a decade from now; if the government can plan ahead the long-term care programs, combining it with the early childhood education policies, to counsel the combined system of “kindergarten and long-term care education”, then, it can keep those colleges and universities facing closures to keep going, and it can also, help the country, pass this dilemma.
The legislative branch started enforcing the “Long-Term Care 2.0” policies, hoping to set up cheap, high-quality, and fluid long-term care systems, but, toward the challenges that the program will come to face soon, the plan isn’t, so optimistic; the biggest problem that rises now is: the lack of human resources, the locations for the homes as well as the finances for the program.
How to turn the crises of “aging in the community, combined with a reduction of birthrate” is the issue at hand, and work hand-in-hand to solve the problem of colleges and universities closing down, that, is what the government needs to work on immediately.
The various university campuses are all very wide in space, with an assortment of accommodations available. If they can alter some of the dorms into units that the elderly who lived alone can live in, the long-term care facilities, or the preschools or kindergartens for children, to set up a “Long-Term Care & Early Childhood Education College”, there will be jobs available for the nursing, the long-term care, the health, the early childhood education, as well as the social work majors, and on the one hand, it can help getting the needed training for the workers, so they can have a place to put the theories they’d learned in class into practices, so they will be able to start working right after graduation; it can resolve the issues of the colleges closing down by the bundles, as well as helping the government with the trials of the increased population of elderly, as well as the reduction of birthrate too.
Because the elderly in the long-term care programs are required to have the physicians, and these schools don’t have the doctors available, I recommend, that the government have more public program sponsored physicians in training, after they received their certifications as physicians, they will get assigned to work in the various “long-term care and early childhood colleges”, as these colleges needed the medical units, and it can also, resolve the issues of children’s and infants’ needs for medical provisions.
As the education department discussed the matter, they’d worried that the doctoral professors would have difficulties adapting to this system, that it would be hard to put the theories into practice, but, we can think of ways, as application is way more important than theories, if the schools can hire the high-quality professors needed to teach, then, provide trainings for the professors, then, it would be allotting the resources of the society to good use, a huge step, in helping the country change for the better.
And so, this sounds like a good program, combining the theories, with the applications, but, would it work? Nobody knows, because for now, this is still only just an idea that someone has, and we won’t know if it’s going to work well, or if it won’t, until someone turns these beliefs into actions.