屏障的消逝：九年義務教育與婦女解放運動之於台灣追求世界級人力資源之影響 - 政大學術集成

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(1)International Master’s Program in Asia-Pacific Studies College of Social Sciences National Chengchi University. 國立政治大學亞太研究英語碩士學位學程. Master’s Thesis 碩士論文. 論文題目 Raising the Barrier: Widening Participation, Female. Emancipation and Taiwan’ s Search for World-Class Human Resources. 屏障的消逝：九年義務教育與婦女解放運動之於台灣追求世界級人力資源之影響 Student: Brian Cherry 林布恩. Advisor: Professor Chuing Prudence Chou 周祝瑛教授. Copyright © Brian Cherry 2016.

(2) 105 年. 中華民國. June 2016. 6月. 論文題目 Thesis Topic. Raising the Barrier: Widening Participation, Female. Emancipation and Taiwan’ s Search for World-Class Human Resources. 研究生：林布恩指導教授：周祝瑛. Student: Brian Cherry Advisor: Chou Chuing. 國立政治大學亞太研究英語碩士學位學程碩士論文 A Thesis. Submitted to International Master’s Program in Asia-Pacific Studies. National Chengchi University. In partial fulfilment of the Requirement. For the degree of International Master in Asia-Pacific Studies Copyright © Brian Cherry 2016.

(3) Acknowledgement. This thesis could not even have been begun without the tireless advice, support and encouragement of my thesis advisor and mentor, Professor Chou Chuing, whose unflagging energy and boundless subject knowledge carried me through those. moments when hope faded or the language barrier seemed insurmountable. The snacks were very welcome, too.. The insightful criticism of my thesis committee helped focus me on my topic and prevented me from turning the task of writing this thesis into a crushing burden.. Eternal thanks and none of the blame are due to Professors Hsien-Ming Lien and LiTien Wang for their exhaustive efforts to spin gold from straw.. The loving support of my wife Lin Nai-Hsuan was indispensable in the production of this work. In addition to translation skills, her ability to mobilise fresh reserves of. motivation, to bully/encourage me whenever my energies were exhausted and just to be there to remind me why I was doing this to myself ensured that the finishing line. was finally crossed, on time, under budget and with the minimum of trauma all round.. 1.

(4) 中華民國. 105 年. 6月. June 2016 Abstract. Gender inequality is a legacy of pre-modern societies which has proven remarkably. durable throughout the world. In particular, the status of women in education and the workplace has always been that of second-class citizens, with little effort made to provide them with the same range of opportunities as males until comparatively. recently in modern history. In Taiwan’s case, the cause of gender equity was given a. considerable boost in 1968 by the Nine-Year Compulsory Education Policy (NYCEP) which, although it made no specific gender provision, levelled the playing field for. girls in both further levels of education and in the workplace in a time of great social change. The contention of this study is that changes in the social status of working. women are reflected in the roles they are able to adopt within their societies and that the increased proportion of Taiwanese women in the high-status profession of. teaching is indicative of an increasingly positive social view of women as participants in society. This study aims to investigate the effects of the NYCEP on women’s. participation in the teaching profession, using data on overall teacher numbers to. show that it heralded an increasingly equitable employment environment for women in Taiwan.. Keywords: The 1968 Nine-Year Compulsory Education Policy, Gender Equity, Female Emancipation, Human Resources.. 2.

(5) Table of Contents. Acknowledgement.................................................................................................................................... 1 Abstract .................................................................................................................................................... 2. List of Figures............................................................................................................................................ 4 List of abbreviations ................................................................................................................................. 5. Chapter 1 - Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 6 1.1 – Research Background .................................................................................................................. 6 1.2 - Research Objectives and Questions ........................................................................................... 10 1.3 Research limitations ..................................................................................................................... 12. 1.4 Definition of key terms ................................................................................................................. 12 Chapter 2 – Literature Review ................................................................................................................ 14 2.1 Theoretical models used .............................................................................................................. 14 2.2 Widening participation in education ............................................................................................ 15. 2.3 Barriers to female education in Taiwan ........................................................................................ 17 2.4 Measuring social status ................................................................................................................ 20. Chapter 3 - Methodology ....................................................................................................................... 22. Chapter 4 – Research Findings and Discussion ...................................................................................... 27 Chapter 5 – Conclusions and Recommendations ................................................................................... 58. References .............................................................................................................................................. 66. Appendices ............................................................................................................................................. 71. 3.

(6) List of Figures. Figure 1 Conceptual model of the study ................................................................... 24 Figure 2 Progression rate of school graduates to next level (%)................................ 38 Figure 3 Number of students at next two levels of education by gender 1968-78...... 44 Figure 4 Female enrolment trends in Secondary Education 1968-78 ........................ 45 Figure 5 Number of Teaching posts at each level of schooling ................................. 52. Figure 6 Female teachers as a percentage of the total at each level of schooling ....... 54. 4.

(7) List of abbreviations JHS. Junior High School (also Junior High Schooling). NYCEP. Nine-Year Compulsory Education Policy. SHS. Senior High School (also Senior High Schooling). UNESCO. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. 5.

(8) Chapter 1 - Introduction 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 newlycompulsory 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 6.

(9) (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 7.

(10) 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 8.

(11) 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.. 9.

(12) 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 10.

(13) 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?. 11.

(14) 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.. 12.

(15) 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. 13.

(16) Chapter 2 – Literature Review 2.1 Theoretical models used. Human Capital Theory has long been a central tenet of economic policy for most. developed and developing nations: industrialisation requires of the individual worker. common basic standards of literacy, numeracy, socialisation and workplace discipline which are most easily imparted through a shared educational experience. Schultz crystallised the economists’ view of labour productivity as being a function of a. population’s average education level (Schultz, 1961) and this view has essentially remained at the core of education policy across the world (Becker, 2009),. (Fitzsimmons, 2015), (Gillies, 2012). Indeed, Human Capital Theory has gripped the. globe’s policy-makers to the extent that ‘modernity’ has become almost synonymous with a widely-accessible form of state-provided education which has its roots in the European Enlightenment tradition (Fagerlind & Saha, 1989, p. 32).. Gillies has conducted much useful work in critiquing the link made between HCT and. education policy (Gillies, 2012), (Gillies, 2015), particularly by introducing the policy switch which occurred from regarding education as a form of economic consumption to one of investment. This, he identifies, is one of the key factors which drove. economists to regard education as an indispensable part of industrialisation and thus. of the quest for the sort of ‘modernity’ which consumed East Asia in the 20th Century and which Taiwan embarked on wholeheartedly in the post-war period. In addition to identifying the benefits of HCT as a driver for policy, he lays out the limitations. inherent to regarding education policy solely as a tool for national development and ignoring its other dimensions. His warning that HCT sees, “education in one. particular role only and its continued central importance relies almost entirely on its capacity to continue to be seen as economically vital” (Gillies, 2012, p. 234) should 14.

(17) alert educators and students alike as to how this functional approach fundamentally alters the nature of education and scholarship.. Bray, Adamson & Mason (Bray, Adamson, & Mason, 2014) provide useful. theoretical models for approaching comparative education. In identifying the lack of standardisation in national education systems, the fluidity of education as a practical discipline and the situational nature of education analysis, they argue a convincing case for making the selection of a viewpoint an early step in conducting any. comparison. Taking an academic perspective, this paper aims to inform discourse on the real-world effects of policy reform on gender parity as defined by The Dakar. Framework for Action: “achieving equal participation of girls and boys in all forms of education based on their proportion in the relevant age-groups in the population” (UNESCO, 2000).. 2.2 Widening participation in education. A.H. Halsey (1992) makes several pertinent observations on the motivations. governments have for increasing access to education; and on the effects expanded. High School enrolments have on the system within which they occur. Halsey notes from the example of expanded US High Schooling that this sort of expansion. represents, “the transformation (of the system) from a mass terminal to a mass. preparatory institution reflecting changes in the occupational division of labour from one largely made up of agricultural and industrial workers to an increasingly. differentiated structure in which white-collar workers formed the majority” (Halsey, 1992, p. 18). As seen in Taiwan’s case, both the expansion of elementary education under Japanese rule and the NYCEP represented a shift from ‘education as the. preserve of an elite’ to ‘education as the norm for the whole population and a first step on a formal educational journey’ and Halsey’s view is especially well-suited to the 15.

(18) case of those Taiwanese women who were destined for that whitest of white-collar. work, teaching. Since the NYCEP was outlined in the Fourth Economic Development Plan (1965-68), by ROC’s Council for Economic Development and Planning (CEDP). (The Republic of China, 1965), it is evident that this transformation of the Elementary. level from a terminal to a preparatory stage of education was an explicit motivation on the part of the ROC government for expanding access to Junior High Schooling on. Taiwan. Halsey’s further comments on the distinction that must be drawn between the absolute and relative gains for disadvantaged groups produced by expanded access to education and these are also relevant to the theme of this thesis: it will discuss. whether expanded access to education resulted in genuinely equitable outcomes for girls or merely pushed back the point at which the same lack of equity presented itself.. Kosack (Kosack, 2012) brings an analytic approach to the study of why nations. choose mass education as policy. His contention that Taiwan’s post-war education. reforms were driven by the expectations of various “vital constituencies” (Kosack,. 2012, p. 97) rather than top-down technocratic policy is insightful and supports the view that private education in Taiwan has been the preferred option only of the. uppermost elites seeking competitive advantage and of those who had no state-. provided alternative. This conclusion is supported by data on JHS enrolments which. show that the market share of private school enrolments at this level collapsed in the wake of the NYCEP, once a free-at-the-point-of-use alternative was available. (Ministry of Education, Republic of China (Taiwan), 2015a). Of particular note is. Kosack’s assertion that, having eliminated or alienated the Taiwan-born elites early in its rule, the KMT-dominated government could no longer rule via a semi-colonial. approach using Japanese-era institutions and traditional social networks, but in the 16.

(19) wake of the 228 Incident instead had to appeal directly to the peasant population with opportunities for social advancement and increased wealth through education. This assertion is interesting in light of the tensions between traditional gender roles in. Taiwanese society and the new opportunities for female wage-earning that economic. restructuring produced. It can be inferred from Kosack’s analysis that once the idea of light-industrial paid employment for girls was well-established in the minds of. Taiwanese parents, they saw that the opportunity this presented for additional family income would depend on whether their daughters were educated or not and lobbied their political representatives accordingly.. 2.3 Barriers to female education in Taiwan. A first step in describing a social barrier is to identify that one exists. Statistics. collected by the Japanese colonial government and the government of the Republic of China show that Taiwanese girls attended school in far smaller numbers than boys throughout the first half of the 20th century but do not themselves provide an. explanation. In order to demonstrate that a barrier exists, it is necessary to discount. competing alternative explanations such as demographics or gender-based differences in ability.. Spohr’s study (Spohr, 2003) of the labour economics of the reform provides evidence of a gender bias in education enrolments by demonstrating that the ratio of girls to. boys in the overall population was far more evenly-balanced than it was in the overall school population prior to 1968. His analysis shows that the proportion of female births throughout the period was normal and could not explain their lack of. representation in education by a simple lack of girls to educate. Similarly, he shows that girls did not experience significantly higher mortality rates than boys, so their limited numbers in JHS could not be explained by a spike in female child deaths 17.

(20) between graduating elementary school and entering JHS. He also provides both. illuminating analysis of the subsequent effects of the education expansion of 1968 as well as evidence that even after retrocession, girls received fewer years of formal education than boys in Taiwan.. Lavy’s study (Lavy, 2012) produces a potential explanation: females often. underperform in competitive situations, particularly when placed in direct competition with males. When completing a set of tasks, Lavy’s female subjects were able to. perform on a par with the males when the tasks were presented in single-sex or noncompetitive environments. Those same subjects, when placed in direct competition with each other or with the male participants, showed a notable decrease in. performance relative to their previous level. Lavy’s findings could be interpreted as. meaning that Taiwan’s girls were simply outperformed in the critical entrance exams. during the period when entry to JHS was still selective and non-compulsory, and that the NYCEP simply removed this obstacle. However, a subsequent study by De Paola et al. (2015) shows that females who are accustomed to competitive environments. show no such symptoms of nerves and perform equally well to their male counterparts in competitive and non-competitive environments, whether single-sex or co-. educational. Inferring from these two studies, women who are subject to social. perceptions of gender role can self-limit their competitive performance in order to. conform to a social expectation that women are subordinate to men, but once those expectations are removed or no longer have an effect, there is no difference in intellectual performance resulting from gender.. Wolf (1972) describes the way in which aspects of traditional Taiwanese society acted as disincentives to female participation in education and indeed other facets of society outside the home. Her discussions of anthropological observation in Taiwan through 18.

(21) the 1950s and 1960s show a society in which a gender bias was institutionalised and where limited family resources were expended on the education and career. advancement of male children while girls and women were rarely afforded similar opportunities. In this society, the choice families faced was normally that between educating boys and educating girls and universally came down in favour of boys.. Indeed, even on those happy circumstances where resources exceeded those required for the basic male education, the choice between educating girls and educating boys some more predominantly favoured the male children.. Kubow and Fossum (2007) provide a thoughtful insight into the societal issues. surrounding access to education. In particular, their discussion of the ways in which the motivations for a state to expand educational access and the limitations on its. ability/will to do so are demonstrations of, “the compromises that cultures make as. they confront larger value-driven issues” (Kubow & Fossum, 2007, p. 126) sheds. light on the dilemmas facing developing nations. In Taiwan’s case, the desire to drive economic development through creating a larger, more highly-educated industrial labour force was in direct competition with traditional ideas of social status and family harmony which had previously obstructed women’s paths to education.. Overcoming these barriers represented a compromise between the state’s vision for the future and society’s expectations of the present.. Fagerlind and Saha (1989) provide a timeless analysis of the personal and societal. factors which accompany the use of education as a tool for national development. In particular, they identify the “personal costs to individuals from continued. participation in in the school system” (Fagerlind & Saha, 1989, p. 80) at non-. compulsory levels, which in the context of Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s consisted. of financial costs to families struggling to fund more than one child’s education; in the 19.

(22) loss of security in retirement resulting from failing to educate sons as well as their means would allow; and the opportunity costs to individual women who were expected to marry early and produce heirs for their husbands’ families. These. cumulative costs served to deter females more than males from continuing their educations beyond the basic mandatory level.. 2.4 Measuring social status. Transformations in the social status of a group are easy to see but hard to define, since social status itself is an agglomeration of individual subjective perceptions. We can,. for example, identify the precise moment when a nation abolishes slavery but it is far harder to identify the moment when slaves and their descendants become treated as equals by other citizens. Hollingshead (2011) argues that “the status positions of. individuals and members of nuclear families” (Hollingshead, 2011, p. 22) can be. calculated according to objective measures of education, occupation, sex, and marital. status. By assigning ‘scores’ to particular lengths of schooling; ranking occupation by perceived social status1; assigning arbitrary values to sex and marital status2. depending on how they affect participation in the workforce, Hollingshead created an index which he proposed as a means of quantifying social status and removing the. element of subjectivity. While the index is firmly rooted in the ideal of the American. ‘nuclear family’, Hollingshead’s model provides a framework with which to estimate how social trends will affect the social status of individuals and groups, which. estimates can then be compared against data on the four factors. Based on the four 1. Hollingshead created an ‘occupational scale’ based on the occupational titles used by the United. States Census Bureau in 1970 and assigned each occupational category a score on a nine-step scale, with 9 being highest prestige category. 2. Marital status primarily affected the overall status of families in determining how the average. occupational status of household consisting of a breadwinner and a homemaker were calculated. 20.

(23) factor analysis, increasing the length of education an individual receives will serve to increase that individual’s social status; gaining access to a higher prestige occupation category will likewise increase it; etc. For the purpose of this thesis, it will be. assumed that the effect of a change in any one factor is consistent for all individuals;. and that the effect of such a change on any social group will be in direct proportion to its effect on individual members of the group. Thus, an improvement in women’s overall social status as a result of an additional three years of education will be assumed to be the same as its effect on an individual woman.. 21.

(24) Chapter 3 - Methodology. 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. 22.

(25) 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 statefunded 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, 23.

(26) 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.. F IGURE 1 CONCEPTUAL 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 24.

(27) 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 pre1968 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 25.

(28) 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.. 26.

(29) Chapter 4 – Research Findings and Discussion. 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 statesupported system of schooling for prospective candidates, and it focussed on stateorganised 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 27.

(30) document. 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 28.

(31) 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).. 29.

(32) 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 noncompulsory 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.. 30.

(33) 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 31.

(34) 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-inlaw, 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 32.

(35) 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 33.

(36) 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.. 34.

(37) 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. 2824).. 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 35.

(38) 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 36.

(39) 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 As a result of building on the already impressive primary-level achievements of the Japanese period, the KMT government had managed to increase participation in. elementary schooling to 97%, despite a population increase of 3.3% and without. sacrificing the spending per pupil on elementary education (Kosack, 2012, pp. 102-3). The pool of potential JHS entrants was consequently high from the early 1960s but. prior to the introduction of compulsory JHS the actual enrolment rates remained low. (see Error! Reference source not found.) with typically fewer than one half of each. year’s elementary school graduates progressing their education to the secondary level prior to the NYCEP taking effect. This expansion and entrenchment of effective. elementary schooling in the years prior to the enactment of the reform was important for a number of reasons. Not least of these was that it meant not only had sufficient. schools to be built and teachers trained for far larger numbers of children to undertake JHS, but also that the children themselves had already been adequately prepared to. enter and benefit from it. While the government’s motivation for same was avowedly 37.

(40) to create the workforce required to support the new economy, it created the conditions for a virtuous cycle of self- and national-improvement in boys as well as girls, with both genders reaping relative benefits in terms of schooling and labour force. participation. Girls, however, were set to reap absolute benefits far in excess of the boys and of any gains they had made as a result of any prior education reform. F IGURE 2 P ROGRESSION RATE OF SCHOOL GRADUATES TO NEXT LEVEL (%). S OURCE : A UTHOR, DATA FROM MINISTRY OF E DUCATION M AIN S TATISTICS , 2015 E DUCATION S TATISTICAL I NDICATORS .. The first effect of the NYCEP was, as the measure intended, to increase the numbers of children proceeding beyond the previous 6-year compulsory level Se table 1).. Statistics published by the Republic of China’s Ministry of Education (Ministry of. Education, Republic of China (Taiwan), 2015a) show the upsurge in enrolment for both boys and girls after the reforms took effect. In 1968, there were 375,409 boys. and 241,816 girls enrolled in Junior High School: by the following year, an additional 49,407 boys and 44,867 girls had enrolled; five years after the reform, the numbers of enrolments had increased by over 40% for both genders. The same source also shows 38.

(41) that the class of ’68 graduated from JHS in unprecedented numbers, with the 1971 figure adding nearly 100,000 JHS graduates to the 1968 one, which was itself the. highest recorded number of JHS graduations since 1950. In terms of its explicit aim of increasing the pool of educated workers, the NYCEP initially had an excellent start. It. also had considerable knock-on effects for the generation which benefitted from it and the girls in particular.. As Spohr (Spohr, 2003) illustrates, children of both sexes who were affected by the NYCEP enjoyed higher overall rates of educational attainment than those entering JHS before it. Spohr’s statistical treatment of the movements in total years of. schooling and attainment rates for junior high schooling and subsequent levels show the statistically-significant deviations from previous trends of both total numbers of years of schooling attained and completion of JHS (Spohr, 2003, p. 301). That the deviations grow so rapidly in those children entering JHS in and after 1968. demonstrates that these children were not only more likely to complete this level of. schooling than their pre-reform counterparts but were also then more likely to go on to complete more years of non-compulsory HSLE after their graduation from JHS. Given that entry to HSLE remained competitive and by examination, this suggests. that there was no dramatic drop in the ‘quality’ of individual JHS graduates since they were still able to pass the entrance exams for levels which had been unaffected by the reform, with the sole difference being that they could do so in far larger numbers.. This makes sense in light of Kosack’s assertion that the government devoted more. resources than ever before to the primary education of the cohorts which went on to. benefit from the NYCEP (Kosack, 2012, p. 103): the elementary school experience of. these cohorts meant that they had been better prepared for Junior High Schooling than any previous generation had been.. 39.

(42) Overall, however, numbers for JHS enrolments and completion both remained lower for girls than boys, illustrating Halsey’s point about the difference between absolute and relative gains. Larger numbers of girls were entering JHS than before but larger. still numbers of boys were also doing so. Interestingly, Spohr’s data also shows that. the rate at which successful completion of JHS increased for girls far outstripped that for boys in the four years after the NYCEP. In light of Lavy’s conclusions on female underperformance in competitive environments to which they are unaccustomed. (Lavy, 2012) and the data on improved primary education above, this immediate. change in growth rates for the completion of JHS supports the conclusion that gender biases rather than gender-based limitations on innate ability were behind the lower. JHS enrolment rates of girls prior to this reform; and that once girls had become used to competing in the meritocratic entrance exams on equal terms with boys, they demonstrated their previously-overlooked potential for education. Rates of Participation in Teaching in post-war Taiwan The Nationalist regime which formed the post-war government of the Republic of. China came to Taiwan conscious of their predecessors’ policies of turning Taiwan. into an inalienable part of the Japanese polity. They were also armed with their own intent of rebuilding their newly-won China as a centralised, unified state of which Taiwan was merely one component. While this resulted in significant immediate changes to the curriculum in Taiwanese schools (notably the ‘re-Sinicization’. campaign (Chou P. C., 2004)), they initially made few changes to the structures of either education or teacher training. The Republic of China (ROC) government on. Taiwan, like the Japanese colonisers, exerted absolute control over teacher training with the aim of producing teachers who, “were expected to impart knowledge and. skills in order to produce a well-equipped and dedicated workforce needed to boost 40.

(43) the economy.” (Fwu & Wang, 2002, p. 218) just as the Japanese had. They expanded the network of Normal Colleges and Normal Universities to produce teachers of the. required competency, commitment and in the required numbers to staff their intended educational project. They mandated teacher training programmes for the respective. levels of schooling: for prospective Elementary School teachers it was a JHS diploma. followed by 5 years in a Junior Normal College; and for prospective JHS teachers a 4year programme at a Normal College after graduating from Senior High School. Aware that the success of their project required them to encourage high-calibre. personnel into the teaching profession, they offered exceptionally generous terms (Lo, Hung, & Liu, 2002). Trainee teachers would receive tuition waivers, board and lodging, a small living wage and the guarantee of employment on successful. completion of training. This employment, in turn, guaranteed a secure lifelong job,. high social status, generous salaries and pensions, and a range of perks not available. to other Taiwanese. As a result, teaching under the Republic of China represented an exceptionally attractive route to advancement for the talented children of poor. families who could not afford the fees of elite Senior High Schools or universities. Similarly, women who performed at the highest level in examinations but whose. family resources were exhausted on further education for their brothers were wellplaced to succeed in gaining entry to teacher training programmes under the. meritocratic and universal entrance-exam system. Indeed, Loa et al. identify that. competition was so fierce for the places available that the quality of entrant to the. Normal Schools and Colleges frequently exceeded that of the aforementioned elite schools.. The student quality was relatively high compared to those at the top-ranked senior high schools. Quite a few graduates from these schools went on to more advanced 41.

(44) study and later became principles (sic) or government officers at local and national government agencies. (Lo, Hung, & Liu, 2002, p. 147). Data from the Ministry of Education (2015(b)) shows that women teachers benefitted extensively from the process of embedding education at the heart of national. development. The percentage of female teachers at Primary (Elementary) level rose from 38% in 1966 to 49% in 1976 as the first post-68 JHS cohorts completed their. training, while the results at the Secondary (Junior and Senior High) level were even more pronounced. Whereas in 1966 the proportion of women Secondary School. teachers was less than 25%, this had almost doubled by 1978, the point at which those teachers who graduated JHS as part of the 1968 JHS cohort had completed Senior High Schooling and teacher training.. Prior to 1968, the gender balance of the teaching profession was heavily weighted in favour of men. In 1950, the first year for which data is available, women made up. only slightly more than one-quarter of all Taiwan’s teachers, including less than one. third of all elementary school teachers and less than one fifth of all secondary school teachers. At the same time, women made up roughly half of Taiwan’s population. Both males and females benefitted from increased opportunities in the teaching. profession thanks to the NYCEP and the teaching profession can therefore be viewed. as one of the most effective enablers of social mobility in Taiwan’s modern history. It created not only freely-accessible meritocratic routes to single-generation social. mobility but also created job vacancies at the end of these routes in sufficient numbers as to make a difference in the overall numbers benefitting from them. The effects on the numbers of women entering one of Taiwanese society’s most highly-regarded. professions were nothing short of dramatic, indicating a greater official acceptance of women in high-status occupations.. 42.