COR Point 19 Human Rights Education and Training

63. Taiwan’s national education has listed human rights education as one of seven “disciplines” in elementary school education since the gradual introduction of an uniform Grade 1-9 curriculum since the 2001 school year, which has formed the basis for the integration of human rights education into all areas of learning.¹⁷ In 2014, the “Twelve-Year Basic Education Program” was introduced. In the new Twelve - Year Basic Education Curriculum to take effect in the 2018 school year, Human rights education will be integrated with all fields, subjects and flexible learning teaching methods and will no longer be an official course and will not have a clearly delineated section number. Human rights education curriculum guidelines will also be cancelled.¹⁸

64. Enhancement of human rights awareness and understanding as well as respect for human rights concepts is an extremely critical step in the process of democratization. Considering the fact that currently serving teachers never received abundant training in human rights education courses and that their own understanding and acceptance of human rights values and principles are insufficient, the Ministry of Education (MOE) from 2009 established a “Curriculum and Instruction Consulting Committee” for national human rights education and curriculum and instruction consulting teams in local governments to assist teachers to transform human rights education into course instruction. The performance of the curriculum and instruction consulting system has been widely praised.¹⁹ However, the Twelve Year Basic Education Program does not plan to continue the central government human rights education team and city and county government human rights counselling networks are expected to shrivel in turn.

65. We recommend that the government should draft a national human rights education action plan and arrange necessary resources to ensure that educational workers, government officials, judges, prosecutors, law enforcement personnel and military personnel receive appropriate human rights education and become familiar with human rights knowledge and information and work in common to promote and guarantee the realization of all human rights. With regard to the training of teachers, the government can adopt suitable measures such as continuing to invest resources into human rights education curriculum and instruction consulting systems, maintaining space for dialogue among human rights professional groups, cultivating the human rights teaching quality and teaching ability and cultivate the capability of human rights instructors to provide individualized education as well as use human rights education indicators to monitor whether curricula and course work are implemented, track the learning progress of students and ensure the realization of human rights education and learning. With regard to course content, teaching methods and teaching materials, care should be taken to avoid formalistic article by article interpretation as in lectures. Instead, the government can encourage schools and institutions to choose systematic human rights teaching materials and make good use of the related resources of civil society organizations and bolster cooperation with NGOs in human rights education work.

17. The Grade 1-9 Curriculum has three separate versions, namely the 2001 Provisional Curriculum Guidelines, the 2003 Curriculum Guidelines and the 2008 Curriculum Guidelines. The 2008 Curriculum Guidelines added “marine education” and also revised “gender education” to “gender equity education.” The seven disciplines are now gender equity education, environmental education, information technology education, home economics education, human rights education, career development education and marine education. A comprehensive guide to G1-9 curricula (in Chinese) is at: http://ppt.cc/13tJ.
18. The 12-year basic education program will no longer issue curriculum guidelines for each separate discipline. Instead, a research and revision task force for the curriculum guidelines for each field of study will arrange topic working circles to provide concepts and key points for learning. Human rights and gender equality education, environmental education and marine education will be listed together as four “major issues” with 15 other “ordinary issues.” The Twelve Year Basic Education Guidelines (2014) can be seen (in Chinese) at the following website: http://ppt.cc/87IDV.
19. See Research, Development and Evaluation Commission (RDEC), “Evaluating the Current Situation in Implementation of the Grade 1-9 Curriculum,” 2010. The website for the MOE Gender Equity Education curriculum and instruction committee (in Chinese) can be accessed here: http://genderedu.moe.edu.tw/intro/super_pages.php?ID=intro1.