With the news that Asians are now the largest group of immigrants to the USA, I figured I'd write a little story about Taiwanese studying abroad in America.
Taiwanese studying abroad is a big business both here and America. Here there are many "study abroad consultants" whom charge inordinate amounts of money to help people to study abroad. Basically not doing anything that a student couldn't do on their own, but I guess many rich families just want to pay for it and then forget about it.
On the American side there are many....."schools" which cater to international students. Basically places where all the students are foreigners, and the education level is extremely poor, mostly due to the fact that most of the students don't speak English. As you can see parents who are sending kids who can't speak the language, are paying to say their child goes to school in America, and not to get a proper education.
This situation is better than before however. In the past Taiwanese students weren't allowed to leave the country after they turned 16. This was because they had to do mandatory military service. Before this children weren't even allowed to have passports. So in these situations to "study abroad" meant parents would take their children on vacation to America and then leave them there illegally with either family or pay for their own apartment. At any one time it was estimated that there were 50,000 of these types of "students" living in America. And needless to say their life quality and education was pretty poor and there ended up being some real horror stories. Thankfully the government eventually allowed kids to have their own passports and to be allowed to go abroad after age 16.
The newest way of studying abroad though starts before birth. MANY Taiwanese women who are a few months pregnant go to America and then stay there longer than their visa, hiding in special illegal hotel/hospitals for women who want to have a baby in America. This way at any point the child can study abroad.
Why all this effort? Is Taiwan's education system that bad? Well that question could send me on an endless rant, instead i will just give out some facts. Both high school and university have an entrance exam to get into, while not only stressful, many students do not get accepted. Forgive my dated numbers but over a 15 years ago, only 40% of students got high enough scores to get into school. Also the normal education style is about making students memorize information and be tested on it. It is said that in their time from elementary school through high school, a student will have taken around 30,000 exams. Doing the math that seems like 10 exams a day, but when you add in essentially six day school weeks, nearly year round schooling, and going to two different schools a day, it seems torturous and sadly true.
While I wouldn't wish the Taiwanese education system on even my worst enemy, things are very very slowly improving. It is said that Taiwan has the largest number of universities per capita, meaning more and more students can get a university education. Also the entrance exams for high school and university are slowly being taken away. Finally the high school system will no longer be a ranked system where the best students go to the best school, soon they will just go to their local high school, which will cut back on a lot of pressure students face at a young age.
I'm also hoping that like Korea, Taiwan's businesses will change what kind of workers they are looking for, which in turn will change the education style, similar to what happened in Korea. I also want to say that of course there are some great and amazing students here in Taiwan, and many who study abroad and put their American counter parts to shame.
Today's picture is from one of my Chinese textbooks. It is a story about the situation years ago of Taiwanese children being left in America illegally to live and study on their own. As you can see, my book likes to have one article each chapter which is written by hand. Giving me the challenge of not only reading Chinese, but reading it in somebody's handwriting, which is nearly impossible. I must admit though, when I do find myself able to read it, I feel a large amount of pride. Not only being able to read such confusing handwriting, but also that I'm able to read articles about real topics, and not just children's books.
