Owing to the multi-faceted nature of the effects of the NYCEP, the findings will first be discussed under the headings of the individual research questions and then drawn together in light of the overall research objectives.
Historic background
The history of education on Taiwan is one of political intent. From the earliest years the Confucian tradition dominated both syllabus and examination style (Ching &
Chou, 2012, p. 21), providing society with a social order and technocratic leadership while giving eligible individuals a route for social advancement through study. The key point of this this kind of study was that it was conducted privately, with no supported system of schooling for prospective candidates, and it focussed on state-organised examinations and not teaching. Learning was via memorisation of
privately-owned copies of classic texts, and while trades and native-place guilds often maintained libraries for talented sons, these texts were for the most part accessible only to families with the wealth to afford them. For the majority of this time, girls were excluded from taking the Imperial exam and although private education of daughters was not unknown, it lagged far behind that of their brothers who were able to use their learning to further themselves in the world outside the home. It was left to foreign missionaries to begin the task of educating Taiwan’s girls, with the first school founded by Canadian George Mackay in 1884 (Peng & Wang, 2005).
After the Qing Empire ceded Taiwan to Japan in the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki, the new Japanese rulers introduced a ‘modernisation’ programme designed to make their new possession a profitable concern and to fully-incorporate Taiwan into their vision of Empire. Although in the Use the "Insert Citation" button to add citations to this
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initial stages both rulers and ruled were clear the relationship was a colonial one, the latter years of Japanese rule saw attempts to rewrite Taiwan’s people as Japanese subjects rather than colonial ones, albeit second-class ones who would require a longer period of instruction before becoming fully-Japanese. A consistent part of this ongoing programme of moulding Taiwanese to Imperial expectations was the
introduction in 1943 of a system of 6-years of compulsory primary education for both girls and boys, organised on Western lines and aiming to train Taiwan’s children as skilled workers and obedient citizens (Ching & Chou, 2012, p. 24). In the words of Vernon Mallinson, this style of education served, “to produce not only a more literate and capable workman, but also to discipline him and shape him morally and socially for his lowly task” (Mallinson, 1961, p. 153). Taiwanese were expected to ‘buy into’
Japan’s imperial project and accept their place in Japanese Imperial society, which included a strict segregation of genders in societies. Throughout the Japanese period these 6 years of elementary schooling were the only universal state-funded education for Taiwanese schoolchildren and entry to subsequent levels of education was both non-compulsory and selective, with the criteria for entry being to pass written entrance exams with appropriate grades. Owing to the segregated and second-class nature of the education they received, girls were at a distinct disadvantage when it came to competitive exams.
With the Japanese defeat in 1945, Taiwan came under the governance of the Qing Empire’s recognised successor-state, the Republic of China (ROC). The new
Nationalist government of Taiwan began a campaign of ‘Sinification’, to rid Taiwan of Japanese cultural influences and rebuild it as part of their vision of a modern Chinese polity. They did, however, retain many of the governance structures that had
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existed in the colonial era. The 6-year basic education system was one of these structures and it remained in place until 1968 when it was replaced by a 9-year compulsory system with no entrance exam for entry to Junior High Schools and with co-educational schools being the norm. It is clear from the historic uses to which governments have put education on Taiwan that nation- and capacity-building have been its main focus and so in the context of this study it should be viewed on the Bray and Thomas Cube (Bray, Adamson, & Mason, 2014, p. 9) at geographical level 3.
There were several reasons behind the post-war decision to expand compulsory education beyond the elementary level, stemming from both social and economic causes. The limited number of Junior High Schools had long been a bone of contention for Taiwan’s upwardly-mobile families and the resultant intense competition for places through competitive examinations was thought to have a detrimental effect on children’s mental and physical health. The Ministry of
Education began drafting policies to address the shortage of Junior High Schooling in what was then officially ‘Taiwan Province’ in 1955, with a proposal aimed merely at increasing the provision of Junior High Schooling in Taiwan alone without changing the entry routes or making this level mandatory. The Ministry next attempted to address the issue in 1964 with a plan to again expand non-compulsory JHS to allow more students to participate and thereby hopefully reduce the pressure of the entrance exam somewhat. However, these proved to be stopgap measures which had limited effect for girls and in 1967 the Ministry finally grasped the nettle by expanding the period of compulsory education for all children, regardless of gender, from six to nine years. The Nine-Year Compulsory Education Policy (NYCEP) was enacted only one year later (Chang C.-C. , 1991, pp. 9-52).
30 Women’s Participation in Education
In the era of western-style education (defined here as that of the post-Qing era), Taiwanese girls had historically had lower rates of participation in public education than did boys. The introduction of compulsory elementary schooling under Japanese rule brought about the first major change in the education of girls but still the female rates of participation lagged behind that of boys, dramatically so at the higher non-compulsory levels. Appendix A gives an illustration of this trend from the period 1900-03 of enrolment in the various schools which were available to Taiwanese children under Japanese rule: in the same year that 2,453 Taiwanese boys entered elementary schools, only 341 girls did. This vividly demonstrates that from the very beginning of modern education in Taiwan, there were significantly lower participation rates for girls than for boys (臺灣總督府總督官房文書課, 1900).
Statistics published by the Republic of China’s Executive Yuan show that over the period under consideration, Taiwan consistently enjoyed a healthy gender ratio (Statistical Bureau, 2014). Similarly, Kan (Kan, 2010) demonstrates that the increased rates of enrolment observed after the reforms for both genders were not solely due to coincidental improvements in birth rate or child health. His data shows that birth and mortality rates for the children of both genders who benefitted from the NYCEP remained consistent with those for children born in earlier generations and so the dramatic rise in female participation cannot be explained by an increase in female infant births or a dramatic increase in female infant survival rates, but only by an increase in the proportion of female children who took part in education. For the purposes of this paper, it will therefore be assumed that gender differences in school enrolment over the period considered were not caused by any abnormal disparity in numbers between male and female children.
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This trend of low female participation continued after the end of World War 2, since the incoming Republic of China government did not initially make significant changes to the length of compulsory education in Taiwan and consequently JHS participation rates for both sexes remaining comparatively low until the NYCEP. We can conclude from this that the upsurge in female participation post-1968 was not a correction of any (historically-speaking) temporary downturn but instead represented a genuine departure from the precedent of the modern (post-Qing) era.
The reasons for this precedent of gender discrimination were twofold: economic and cultural. Economic factors played a part at both governmental and familial level and both were defined by the availability or not of access to resources. Until Taiwan’s national economic development reached a bare minimum level, the resources to provide for the building, maintaining, staffing and funding of sufficient schools for all children across the ROC-controlled islands were beyond the state’s ability to provide.
Chou (2004) gives details of the scale of physical preparation required for
universalising Junior High Schooling in the run up to the NYCEP and demonstrates the scale of difficulty involved in expanding education provision across the entire island. This same lack of economic development also meant that large numbers of individual families could not provide the resources to fund their own children’s education and therefore had to rely heavily on state provision, which was itself constrained by a lack of resources due to the relatively poor shape of the post-war economy. Table ‘Number of students at all levels of schooling’ in (Ministry of Education, Republic of China (Taiwan), 2015a) demonstrates that enrolment in private Junior High Schools fell drastically in the early 1970s, after rising consistently in the period prior to the reform taking effect. Although private school student
numbers did begin a fresh rise almost immediately, they did not recover the same
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absolute numbers until 1993, over a quarter of a century later, by which time they represented a far smaller proportion of overall enrolments than before. This sharp drop in the numbers of students enrolling in private schooling contrasts sharply with the simultaneous steep rise in those choosing state schools and lends credence to the idea that Taiwanese families made educational choices for their children with their financial constraints firmly in mind.
Culturally, the structure of Taiwanese society meant that parents relied on their sons to support them in old age while daughters were destined to become part of another family’s household. This provided an incentive to maximise the earning potential of sons, a feat traditionally achieved through learning, while the education of daughters was a priority only in well-off families or those who hoped to increase the marriage potential of their girl children by giving them a sophistication and glaze of culture. In addition, folk-practices such as the “sim-pua” (新婦仔) form of marriage (Wolf, 1972, p. 171), in which families adopted a girl child to raise as a future daughter-in-law, acted as positive disincentives to families to spend on their female children’s education. They removed any future benefit that could be accrued to either family through having an educated daughter since the natural parents had already passed guardianship over and the host parents had already secured their son’s bride. In the zero-sum game of allocating financial resources to education, the family’s long-term best interests were served by putting maximum effort into educating their sons and not ‘wasting’ any on their daughters.
In contrast, Kosack identifies an interesting political trend which affected girls’
chances of education: the extent to which regime courting of “vital constituencies”
(Kosack, 2012, p. 36) prompted educational reform. Having earlier eliminated large sections of the native-born Taiwanese elites during the 228 Incident and alienated the
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survivors of that Japanese-educated social strata, the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) were obliged to abandon their initial semi-colonial practice of governing through these same local elites and instead seek legitimacy directly from the lower levels of society through a series of populist programmes (Kosack, 2012, pp. 92-98). One of these measures was to widen access to education for the children of Taiwan’s largely-peasant families, as this was still widely held to be the primary means of economic improvement and social advancement in Taiwanese society.
Socio-Economic Barriers to Female Education
Taiwanese girls had thus faced substantial barriers to education throughout the period when Taiwanese society could be categorised as being in the first two stages of Rostowian economic development: a ‘traditional society’ or having the
‘pre-conditions for take-off’. Economic and social factors had interacted to create profound disincentives to the education of girl children and even the advent of industrialisation under Japanese colonial rule produced limited benefits in terms of either improved opportunity or increased parental motivation. Despite access to state-funded elementary schooling and a wider range of non-traditional occupations, Taiwan’s women were, prior to the NYCEP taking effect, still labouring as components of a family unit under recognisably-‘traditional society’ family arrangements. They were not labouring as individuals in their own right who could make informed choices about when, where and what to labour at, let alone command their own earnings (Diamond, 1979, pp. 318-9) (Farris, 1994, p. 312) and had limited autonomy unless they were willing to break family ties completely. Thus, their social status had not essentially changed in an era when their brothers were performing military service or apprenticeships and were yet to set out on their own careers – daughters merely had more visible value to their parents as interim sources of monetary income until the
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time came when the sons were free to take up their traditional role of providing for the family and the daughters could safely be married off.
Historic Influences on Teaching in Taiwan
Taiwanese society has long held teaching to be a uniquely worthy profession and accorded its practitioners a high degree of respect, even when more material signs of appreciation such as salaries and pensions have failed to keep pace with the
development of the wider economy. The relative statuses of teachers and women throughout Taiwan’s history provided the greatest limitation on the extent to which women could participate in the teaching profession. Fwu and Wang identify the unique status of teachers as being based on three historic legacies: traditional Confucian culture; the Japanese occupation; and the post-war nation-building activities of the Nationalist-led Republic of China (Fwu & Wang, 2002).
Taiwanese society draws deeply on traditional mores and values from China, not least of all the legacy of the ‘model teacher for every generation’ (萬世師表), Confucius.
Under his value system, scholars are accorded the very highest levels of status and the respect which is due a teacher is ranked equivalent to that given to parents. Both parents and teachers are regarded as conduits to a child’s moral cultivation as well as being imparters of knowledge, with the teacher in particular being seen as a learned scholar and moral exemplar who demonstrates society’s ideals of civic behaviour.
Crucially, the image of the teacher in Confucian style was universally male and the plethora of classic idioms referring to teachers reflects this assumption of maleness e.g. ‘a teacher for one day is a father for life (一日為師，終身為父).’ Women did not feature in this traditional view of teaching, not as students and particularly not as teachers.
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The Japanese, as fellow-heirs to the Confucian legacy, also regarded the role of tutor as holding a uniquely prestigious place in society. The traditional Japanese term sensei (せんせい) reveals similar commonly-held assumptions about the characteristics of a teacher to those of traditional Chinese society: venerable,
respected, morally-correct and definitely male. For the majority of the early period of Japanese rule, teachers were exclusively Japanese expatriate men who by virtue of their positions were both better-educated than the majority of Taiwanese (and indeed the majority of Japanese of the time) and also were exercising authority on behalf of the state. These twin traits (educated scholars and representatives of state power) granted them a status akin to ‘übermenschen’ or superior humans over their
Taiwanese colonial subjects. This status differential was consciously reinforced by the colonial government through the selection mechanisms for colonial service and, once Taiwanese teachers began to be recruited, in the difference in conditions between Japanese teachers and their Taiwanese counterparts (Myers & Peattie, 1984, pp. 282-4).
Once the initial expansion phase of mass education under the Japanese had passed, local teachers were increasingly in demand to staff the schools set up for local students, a demand which increased still more once the policy of ‘Japanisation’ had been implemented to replace Taiwanese culture with the Japanese one in the minds of the islanders. It was in this period that a system for formal teacher training was first established on the island, as a result of the Meiji Court promulgating the Normal School Decree of 1886. This decree specified that cities and prefectures (including Taiwan) establish a system of ‘Advanced’ and ‘General’ Normal Schools to train teachers for the new education system which was to be strictly gender-segregated as a matter of state policy (Huang, 2016). The General Normal School trained their
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students to be teachers and principals at state institutions across the country (the educational ‘coalface’) while Advanced Schools trained the staff of General Normal Schools and thus were responsible for setting the standards by which Taiwanese teachers taught Taiwanese students.
The lower priority which was given to female education under the Japanese is reflected in the respective training programmes for men and women at the Advanced Schools, where students enrolled hoping to become staff at Normal Schools and thus to train future generations of ‘coal-face’ teachers. Both the standards for entry to these programmes and their duration differed markedly, with males being selected at a higher threshold and trained more intensively.
The male teacher education division admitted the graduates of general normal schools , the study period of this division being three years. The female teacher education division admitted those who completed two years’ study at the general normal schools, the study period for this division being 4 years. (Huang, 2016, p. 96)
In other words, the future educators of women teachers in the Japanese era were not themselves required to have graduated from teacher training, whereas this was mandatory for their male counterparts.
Simultaneously, across the East China Sea, the ground was being prepared for the reforms in gender education which would eventually come to Taiwan. In the wake of the same humiliating defeat that forced their surrender of Taiwan to Japan, the Qing Empire was overthrown and eventually a new Republic of China emerged to take its place. The women’s rights movement played a visible part in the early political history of this new nation and, building on abortive and half-hearted efforts of the latter Qing government, the Republic instituted a new education system in 1912 (one year after the Republic’s foundation) which provided secondary education for girls
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and approved co-educational elementary schools (Bailey, 2007, p. 6). The stark contrast in attitudes to educating women in Japan and China at this time is illustrated by admissions to higher education: the first women students of Tokyo Imperial University were only informally admitted in 1913, more than forty years after the Meiji government first mandated education for girls in 1871; women were able to matriculate in Beijing University from 1919, twelve years after the Qing court first approved state education for girls and a mere seven years after the Republic instituted female secondary education. As Bailey remarked, “the speed with which public education for women was formally sanctioned and implemented in early twentieth century China is sometimes overlooked” (Bailey, 2007, p. 123).
Rates of Participation in Education in post-war Taiwan
Rates of Participation in Education in post-war Taiwan