The reorientation of history teaching in Taiwan's 12-year Basic Education

Abstract

This chapter addresses issues regarding Taiwanese history over the past two decades. It outlines the latest History Curriculum's main features in the Fall of 2019 for schools from G-1 to G-12. The authors explain how it differs from the previous curriculums, with previous intense confrontations setting its stage. The authors also submit that the new Curriculum is a division of the more general Social Studies Domain, which are broader initiatives of a larger education reform wave for launching the 12-year Basic Education. The 12-year Basic Education master plan was initiated during President Ma Ying-jeou's term, though Tsai Ing-wen's government went further in implementation. The paper groups the ongoing conflicts over history teaching through four major ‘events’ while emphasising the need to ‘save’ history teaching from the cycle of polarisation along the pro-China and pro-Taiwan chasm. The new Curriculum must resolve continuing disputes by preparing students to support democratic citizenship. Though the Curriculum did not aim to ‘de-Sinicise’, it could hardly avoid such criticism since it opposes the preceding ‘rectification campaign’ to ‘re-Sinicise’ history learning in schools. Plus, the strategy to simplify the ancient while detailing the contemporary to fit history learning in a limited pedagogical time frame entails a large amount of content reduction concerning China.