COUNTERING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE: Hua Yih-fen said that some junior-high teachers have complained of textbooks that glorify the ‘political tutelage’ era
Taipei Times
Date: Jun 09, 2018
By: Chen Yu-fu / Staff reporter
The Transitional Justice Commission has listed four flaws in new curriculum guidelines
National Taiwan University history professor Hua Yih-fen speaks at an event in Taipei on Jan. 19. Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
for the 12-year national education system, which are scheduled to be implemented in September next year.
The flaws are: a lack of content on the 228 Incident and ensuing White Terror era in high-school curricula, an absence of content about the Holocaust, romanticizing the party-state system and claiming that the quest for transitional justice is potentially divisive.
To promote transitional justice, it is the commission’s job to review curriculum guidelines, as well as textbooks and test questions, particularly to see if they purposefully neglect to mention transitional justice or the White Terror era, commission member Hua Yih-fen (花亦芬) said yesterday.
The chapter in the guidelines about the Republic of China government’s arrival in Taiwan and subsequent transformation gives accounts of the incidents in a fashion that runs counter to the spirit of transitional justice and is unhelpful in demystifying how the Chinese National Party (KMT) used the “political tutelage” period as a pretext for establishing party-state rule, Hua said.
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