1.1 – Research Background
In common with many countries in the developing world, Taiwan has been faced with the challenge of developing its human resources to maximize its economic and social competitiveness in the international arena. A crucial component of this battle has inevitably been the national education system, which was specifically targeted on various occasions for its impact on the skill levels of the workforce, as part of wider plans for national economic development. The most dramatic effects were felt as a result of the Nine-Year Compulsory Education Policy (NYCEP) of 1968, which widened participation both explicitly by mandating state-provided non-selective Junior High Schooling for all children; and implicitly by improving the ability of previously-marginalised groups to compete for entry to higher-still levels of education (HSLE) on graduation from Junior High Schools (JHS). The demand for JHS
education created by this expansion required the production of adequately-trained teachers who eventually had themselves experienced nine years of compulsory education and were themselves beneficiaries of the reform.
The effects on gender equity are worthy of study since not only did girls participate in Junior High Schooling itself in unprecedented numbers, as a result of its newly-compulsory status, but they then progressed on to the still-selective and non-compulsory Senior High School and Tertiary Education levels at vastly increased rates post-1968. Indeed, recent enrolments rates at each level of education are roughly equivalent (for share of population) or weighted in favour of girls until the
postgraduate level, when a gender bias re-emerges in favour of males: over the ten years 2004-14, an average of 49% of undergraduates were female, compared to 42%
of Masters students and only 28% of PhDs (Ministry of Education, Republic of China
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(Taiwan), 2015a). Furthermore, the rates of participation of women in the workforce once they left education also greatly increased in the wake of this reform, with married and single women at a variety of age cohorts experiencing increased
opportunity for paid employment. Although traditional gender roles were not entirely swept away, a major barrier to female participation in education and the workplace was swept away and it is no exaggeration to say that the lot of Taiwan’s women was revolutionized by this one act of widening participation. As Chang Chun-Chig notes,
“The changes on women’s role and status led to a structural change in Taiwan society and also hastened Taiwan’s becoming an industrialized society” (Chang C.-C. , 1991, p. 5), complete with a system for developing its human resources that allowed it to develop economically at an astonishing pace.
One additional aspect of the NYCEP which served to improve the circumstances of Taiwan’s women was that it required a wholesale expansion of the school system. In addition to the normal increase in demand driven by contemporary increases in the school-age population, there was a dramatic increase in the number of junior high schools which resulted from the NYCEP. Not only were new Junior High Schools needed to accommodate the newly-eligible student population, but the increasing number of JHS graduates seeking entry to Senior High Schools required more of these too and this led to an urgent need for more teachers to fill the void. The prestige, job security offered to teachers and opportunity for a government-funded higher
education were immensely attractive, particularly to marginalised groups for whom social mobility by other routes was limited by economic barriers.
The logistics of this transformation were impressive. In order to create the capacity required to accommodate this influx of new students, a school building programme was undertaken across the island. Chou (2004) quotes the increase as from 487 Junior
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High Schools in 1968 to 658 in 1981 and 706 in 1998, creating facilities for 1,009,300 new students to participate in Junior High School (JHS) (Chou P. C., 2004, p. 22).
Concurrently with the school building programme, staff training was also required to supply sufficient teachers, both at this level and to cope with knock-on effects resulting from larger numbers of children being eligible for enrolment in HSLE.
Teacher training underwent dramatic changes in this period, to provide the sheer numbers required by the newly-expanded school-system. Initially, teacher training was conducted in ‘normal schools’ (師範學校) as a three-year programme recruiting directly from Junior High School graduates. Between 1963 and 1967, these schools were transformed into ‘normal colleges’ (師範學院) offering five-year programmes of initial teacher education but again recruiting from Junior High School graduates.
However, owing to the rapidity with which the expansion was implemented, there were initially too few teachers available who were trained to the previous standard and it is likely that the quality of teaching suffered until this could be addressed (Shu, 2016, pp. 47-49).
At the same time, the discussion should not merely be conducted from the perspective of a stage in Taiwan’s development but must also take into account other
developments that affected women’s ability to participate outside the home. Most prominent amongst these was the introduction of effective and inexpensive contraception, typically Intra-Uterine Devices (IUD) and the combined oral
contraceptive pill (COCP) which became widely available in Taiwan during the 1960s as part of a family planning campaign which had reached 43% of eligible couples by 1970 (Sun & Lee, 1971). These allowed Taiwanese women, in common with women around the globe, to make childbirth and subsequent maternal responsibilities a matter of choice and not an inevitability; and one which they could balance against other
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priorities such as employment. This critical development is important to the story of Taiwan’s women in the workplace as it enabled them to free up sufficient time from motherhood to participate in professional training and to devote considerably-greater amounts of time to their careers. Without this revolution in family planning, their ability to take advantage of the opportunities afforded them by the NYCEP would have been severely curtailed.
This study will examine the consequences of the NYCEP on women’s status in society by examining how their employment as teachers in Elementary and Secondary level was affected by widened access to education in the wake of the NYCEP. It will establish that barriers to female education did exist; identify changes in participation rates that occurred in the decade after 1968; examine the effects of these barriers on the ability of females to achieve the level of qualification required to enter teaching;
identify how women’s participation in teaching changed in the following decade; and use these trends to discuss how the social status of women changed.
Using a gender-based approach to human capital theory, it will look to demonstrate that this reform did indeed mark a turning point for gender equity in Taiwanese society by demonstrating that unprecedented opportunities were opened to women in the high-status profession of teaching as a result of improved access to education at the Junior High School level. It is hoped that lessons can be drawn from this which can inform a more effective use of the female component of Taiwan’s labour force in an era of declining birth rates and an ageing population.
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1.2 - Research Objectives and Questions
Education is widely held to be a great social leveller and the lack of same to be a major barrier to social mobility and equity. Indeed, UNESCO define education as “a fundamental human right and essential for the exercise of all other human rights” and
“a powerful tool by which economically and socially marginalized adults and children can lift themselves out of poverty and participate fully as citizens” (UNESCO, 2016).
The emancipation of these marginalised groups has been specifically targeted in international normative action, most prominently in the Convention against Discrimination in Education, which defined such discrimination as follows:
…any distinction, exclusion, limitation or preference which, being based on race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, economic condition or birth, has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing equality of treatment in education and in particular:
(a) Of depriving any person or group of persons of access to education of any type or at any level;
(b) Of limiting any person or group of persons to education of an inferior standard;
(c) Subject to the provisions of Article 2 of this Convention, of establishing or maintaining separate educational systems or institutions for persons or groups of persons; or
(d) Of inflicting on any person or group of persons conditions which are incompatible with the dignity of man. – UNESCO, 1960.
In its traditional role as a professional and social gatekeeper, education determines the opportunities that are open to individuals and the degree of social mobility which is available to any particular social group within a given society (Apple, 2013).
Consequently, the educational and professional opportunities open to a specific social group can serve as a proxy measure for both how their society views that group’s
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social role and the limits that their society is prepared to accept on their advancement.
In particular, the extent to which a society’s cultivation and deployment of its human resources exhibits gender equity is demonstrated by how well its education serves its girls; and by which professions they are cultivated for by state education.
The research objectives for this paper are to establish the extent to which Taiwanese women experienced barriers to education and employment prior to the NYCEP and how these barriers were raised after it. By examining how the previously male-dominated and highly-respected teaching profession became more open to women in the wake of the NYCEP, the reform’s impact women’s education and employment opportunities will be identified. The study will first establish the existence of social barriers to education for women in Taiwan prior to the NYCEP; then identify the effect of the NYCEP on female participation in education as both students and teachers; and then track the changes in the numbers of girls entering the teaching profession post-1968. Conclusions from this will be drawn regarding the extent of female emancipation heralded by these changes. At the same time, it will make some comments on the wider social context of Taiwan which have relevance to the issue of gender equity in that era. This study will investigate the following five questions:
1. What barriers to female education existed before 1968?
2. What changes occurred in female participation in higher-still levels of education (HSLE) after 1968?
3. Were females under-represented in the teaching profession prior to 1968?
4. What changes occurred in female participation in the teaching profession after 1968?
5. Is there evidence to suggest that the NYCEP impacted the social status of women in Taiwan?
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1.3 Research limitations
The research has limited access to mass data on the number of years of schooling that each teacher held on entry to the profession. This means that an exhaustive
quantitative study of the exact degree to which female status change as a result of improved access to the teaching profession was impossible. In the absence of this data, the study was forced to depend on arguments about the effect on social prestige that factorial changes in the Hollingshead model would have (the ‘Hollingshead model argument’) as well as what has been termed the ‘common sense narrative’ the association of a social group with a high-prestige occupation raises that group’s social prestige accordingly.
Lack of data also prevents quantifiable measurement of the prestige in which teaching has been held in Taiwan, and therefore no comparison of prestige before and after has been possible. Instead, the study has leaned on the simplifying assumption that gender bias has not reduced the prestige in which teaching is held to an extent which would invalidate either the ‘Hollingshead model argument’ or the ‘common sense narrative.’
1.4 Definition of key terms
This thesis will use several key terms in assessing and explaining the NYCEP and its impacts.
Barrier
A barrier will be defined as an economic, social or legal impediment to equitable participation which gives rise to discrimination. The operational definition of an education barrier as defined in UNESCO’s Convention Against Discrimination in Education quoted in full below.
13 Widening participation
The 1997 Kennedy Report provides an operational definition of widening
participation in education which the author has chosen for its simplicity, universality and utility in describing Taiwan’s education reforms of the late 1960s.
Widening participation means increasing access to learning and providing opportunities for success and progression to a much wider cross-section of the population than now. – (Kennedy, 1997)
Under this definition, the NYCEP achieved the widened participation of a number of previously-disadvantaged social groups, most notably the poor, ethnic minorities and females.
Emancipation
Female emancipation is a term with a long history. Although commonly used in connection with political rights, the author will use it in the wider context of the Oxford English Dictionary to reflect the legal, social and political nature of education reform:
The fact or process of being set free from legal, social, or political restrictions.
(Oxford Dictionaries, 2016)
World-class human resources
Owing to contemporary concerns over economic competitiveness in Taiwan, much debate has been raised regarding how the national education system can equip Taiwanese students with the skills they need to function in a global economy and the term ‘world-class human resources’ has gained favour. The search for ‘world class human resources’ will be used to refer to the development of policies and systems to create an internationally-competitive labour force through improved education.
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