Ok well maybe not so dramatic. But every time I see students cleaning their school, i can't help but see it as a middle finger to all those Taiwanese who don't have a job.
Taiwanese schools don't have custodians. Instead the students are in charge of cleaning the school. This is something borrowed from the Japanese view that it's a sense of honor and will make you have pride in your school.
An interesting thing though is there is no such thing as school pride in Taiwan. Nobody loves their school and visits it and gives donations after they graduate. Speaking of which, there aren't even such things as alumni donations, so yay for not getting emails and letters asking for money.
There is also no arguing which school is better, or any such thing as rivalries. I think this lack of pride is for two reasons. The first being that there is a very clear ranking of the schools made by the government, and while it doesn't really reflect the quality of the schools, it does mean that people don't really argue over it. The second is that there are no sports. It seems like sports is the catalyst for loving your school. I'm actually quite jealous of this, for as much as I loved sports, college was always annoying when people would talk about "we have a big game coming up" and things like that. I could never see how somebody could feel that their teams' performance somehow reflected their school's quality.
Bringing it back around to my original topic, I have said it time and time again that with all the schools in the country, if each one just hired one custodian, that would be hundreds of thousands of jobs. Jobs that many families desperately need. Instead they cling to some antiquated view of human psychology, when in fact cleaning the school just makes students hate the school even more.
