This thesis will be conducted first through review of literature on Taiwan’s economic development and education policy history. Then , using secondary data gathered by various Ministries of the Republic of China government, it will identify trends in education level and population relevant to the national widening participation agenda.
Setting the data against a theoretical background will allow a rigorous analysis of female participation in education.
In this thesis, the author will make use of two main theoretical tools: Rostow’s Modernisation Theory (Rostow, 1959); and Human Capital Theory as expounded by Schultz (1961).
Modernisation Theory holds that economic development takes place in five stages:
traditional society; preconditions for take-off; take-off; drive to maturity; and finally the age of high mass consumption. Of specific relevance to this thesis is the transition from a traditional society, characterised by a, “hierarchical social structure, with relatively narrow scope--but some scope--for vertical mobility” (Rostow, 1959, p. 4) and the establishment of the pre-conditions for take-off. In Taiwan’s ‘traditional society’, vertical mobility was most commonly achieved via education in the
Confucian mould and was virtually non-existent for women until the dawn of the 20th Century. Only with the development of the ‘preconditions for take-off’ in the late Qing and Japanese Colonial periods did there come any incentive for the ruling states to systematise and expand education so that it covered all children, and these were the twin imperatives of nation-building and economic development. The NYCEP
represents the conscious ‘drive to maturity’ of the exiled government of the Republic
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of China as it strove to develop the last remaining territory under its control and bolster its legitimacy as the ruling regime.
Fundamental to this claim to legitimacy was the development of Taiwan’s economy, which required considerable investment in the island’s ‘human capital’, defined here as the overall education and skill level of the workforce in an industrialised society.
Recognising that the largely primary-industry dominated economy bequeathed Taiwan by the Japanese would not provide sufficient capital for their ambitious modernisation plans and hopes to regain the Chinese Mainland, the Nationalist
government of Chiang Kai-Shek formulated a series of Economic Development Plans, the fourth of which laid out a massive expansion of universal compulsory and state-funded education beyond the primary level. As noted by Kosack (2012), this also served the political purposes of allowing them to bypass a largely-hostile Japanese-educated native-elite and break that group’s traditional monopoly on public life; while simultaneously appealing directly to the Taiwanese masses by addressing their
demands for new routes to social mobility and wealth via the modernised education system.
A prominent feature of Taiwan’s education reform since the end of WW2 has been the development of a labour force which can ‘punch above its weight’ in terms of economic output, and make up for a comparative lack of numbers with high basic skill levels and individual productivity. Outperforming Taiwan’s global competitors and maintaining the Taiwanese economy’s comparative advantage has required that her workforce be suitably ‘world-class’, which in turn required a high standard of education at all levels. This thesis will use the term ‘world-class human resources’ to mean a workforce which at every level has received an education at or above the normal level for a country at Taiwan’s stage of development. In the period since 1960,
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this has meant the development of a differentiated workforce with a higher proportion of white-collar workers than previously, a process in which the education system and teaching professions play a critical role.
FIGURE 1CONCEPTUAL MODEL OF THE STUDY
Figure 1 illustrates the theoretical framework which is envisaged in this study. Using the Hollingshead model, social status is derived from a number of factors and women’s social status is affected by two in particular which were affected as a result of the NYCEP: education level was explicity changed as the intended outcome of the
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reform; and occupation status changed as a result of the policy intention to upgrade the workforce. These factors are intertwined and ‘female participation in HSLE’ acts as an intervening variable for ‘female employment in the teaching profession, since access to teacher training courses is determined by a prescribed level of qualification.
However, for the purpose of simplifying the theoretical model, they will be treated as separate independent variables.
This thesis will focus on the teaching profession at Elementary and Junior High Schools in the 10-year periods immediately before and after the NYCEP to conduct a comparative analysis across several dimensions as identified in the ‘Bray and Thomas Cube’ framework (Bray, Adamson, & Mason, 2014, p. 9). This profession has
specifically been chosen to demonstrate how traditional gender roles changed over time and in the wake of expanded education opportunities for girls. Teaching has traditionally enjoyed high prestige in Taiwan (Fwu & Wang, 2002) and teachers have been traditionally depicted as exclusively male Chinese role models (Yau, 2015), so the extent to which females have been accepted into this profession serves to highlight how their social status improved to match that of the profession in the wake of the NYCEP. This study hopes to demonstrate that the NYCEP succeeded in making inroads against stereotypical gender roles in Taiwanese society and thus marked an unprecedented turning point in social perceptions of women in Taiwan. The specific focus will be on the students who completed JHS after 1969 and who subsequently qualified as Elementary/JHS teachers from 1975 onward, in contrast with their pre-1968 predecessors. Comparing the change in rates of female participation in Junior High School and the employment of female teachers at the Elementary and Junior High School levels over this time period, the paper will attempt to show that there was a historic bias against female participation in education as both students and teachers
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which cannot be explained by demographic issues; and that this bias was substantially altered after the NYCEP when far larger numbers of qualified women were seeking far larger numbers of teaching positions. By looking at this time-series, it will identify those trends in both male and female teacher numbers associated with education systems, political change, educational finance, the local labour market, gender and socio-economic factors in order to identify how female education opportunity, access to the teaching profession were affected in the 1960s and 70s.
Having identified these trends, it will seek to explain them by drawing on pre-existing tensions in Taiwanese society at the macro and micro levels. These tensions included:
those at the policy level between economic limitations and national development imperatives; and at the familial level, those between traditional family organisation and family financial necessities. It will then consider subsequent correlations between improved access to Junior High School and improved education and employment opportunities in later life for those girls who benefitted from the NYCEPs. In
discussing access, it will focus on gender parity as defined by The Dakar Framework for Action.
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