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Updated Sunday, November 22, 2009 11:39 am TWN, The China Post news staff

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Education is more than books and scores

Bar the rare prodigy students, most of the young adults sitting in the classrooms of NTU medical school probably went through an almost insanely huge amount of study time to get there.

Fostered by Taiwan's score-driven education, bushibans (afterschool tutoring classes) have become a fact of life to millions of students. Many children have started a 14-hour-day study scheme since junior high, leaving home at 7 a.m. and leaving the bushiban after 9 p.m. It is hard for university freshmen produced by such a system not to regard study as a mere quest for marks and nothing else.

For many of these students, college is the first time they have the luxury to freely spend their time. Considering the regiment of textbooks most students had already swallowed, it is not surprising that some choose fun over more hard work.

What's most important, fun is actually one of the most precious gifts college life can give a person. It is through the inspiration and the joy brought by the fun things students do such as participating in extracurricular clubs, where many make life-long friends and discover the dream of their life. Students in Taiwan universities have routinely won major international prizes with inventions they put their heart and passion into. Being a student should be fun, it should not only be “professional.”

Of course, having fun does not mean one can fool around with their studies. Teachers in the university should guide students to respect their academic pursuits. However, classroom order is not the most pressing issue at hand.

The classes Hung toured in her NTU visit was not part of the students' core courses. In Taiwan, where universities generally regard qualified academic performance such as thesis output volume or their ranking in Top-100 lists as the best gauge of the quality of higher education, general education courses are often seen by schools and students alike as courses useful only for their credit points.

Therefore, in addition to going on a public tirade against students for being lazy in class, future well-intentioned experts could also try to turn their eyes at the performance-crazed education culture in Taiwan. One can easily kill off sluggishness in class just by bringing back the high school “force-fed duck” education culture to universities. What's difficult is for educators in Taiwan to truly inspire students so that they will have a true purpose to strive for through their studies.

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