Education

Equal Rights, Fair Opportunities

• Byline:JIM HWANG
• Publication Date:07/01/2010

Early efforts to identify and intervene on behalf of challenged children boost their chances of being placed in normal schools and classes. (Photo by Central News Agency)

Educators, parents, social welfare organizations and the government are putting in a joint effort to provide challenged students with a quality education environment.

Classmates is a 50-minute documentary about four children. Two of them are normal children, while one suffers from Down Syndrome and the other from both hearing impairment and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The story begins when they become classmates in 1991 at an experimental kindergarten dedicated to inclusive education, where a third of the students are physically or mentally challenged. It documents the next 19 years of the four’s lives, growth and friendship, as well as their interaction with parents, teachers and other people, ending when they have reached the age of 22.

In terms of filmmaking, Classmates probably rates as nothing more than an amateur production. But for educators, parents and students, the film is important because it documents not only the growth of four children, but also that of special education in Taiwan. Classmates director Wu Shwu-mey, who is a professor at National Hsinchu University of Education’s Department of Special Education, notes that studies in child development, sociology and special education have shown that challenged children grow and achieve greater personal and social fulfillment by being nurtured in an environment that is as close to normal as possible, which is best facilitated by putting them in regular classes with normal students.

Actually placing challenged children among non-disabled classmates, however, was “quite a shocking idea,” as Wu puts it, when she first proposed a pilot program of inclusive education some two decades ago. “A major problem was that parents of normal kids had concerns about whether their kids’ learning would be negatively affected by their special classmates,” Wu says. “I had to take out newspaper ads just to get enough normal students for a class.”

To show doubters that the approach is not only good for challenged children but also beneficial to their normal classmates, Wu put her own son Wu Jinn-shan—one of the two non-disabled children featured in the documentary—in the class. Wu Jinn-shan studied in inclusive classes for 12 years from kindergarten to junior high school, before he entered a senior high school in Hsinchu and then Fu Jen Catholic University in Taipei County. “It’s not too difficult to get decent academic performances no matter which school or class you’re in,” the younger Wu says. “But an inclusive class is probably the only place where one can learn to accept, appreciate and respect people who are ‘different.’” The other non-disabled child in the documentary went through nine years of inclusive education from kindergarten to the end of elementary school and later entered National Taiwan University, one of Taiwan’s top tertiary education institutions.

Normal Environment

The two challenged children did not go on to higher education, but having non-disabled classmates during kindergarten and elementary school helped equip them with the proper social skills to handle and interact with the “normal” world. The one with Down Syndrome now helps manage her mother’s restaurant, while the one with hearing impairment and ADHD is working for a bakery operated by a private charity foundation. “Parents of challenged kids understand that there are limits and we don’t necessarily expect our kids to achieve the same thing as normal kids,” the father of a challenged child says in the documentary. “What counts for us is a normal environment where our kids can learn and develop and, most importantly, know how to face, communicate and work with normal people when they enter society.”

 

First lady Chow Mei-ching, right, attends the “336 Angel’s Day” activity in support of challenged children and their parents on March 27 this year. (Photo by Central News Agency)

Lin Kun-tsan, executive secretary of the Ministry of Education’s (MOE) Special Education Unit, notes that inclusive education has seen considerable growth in the past two decades. Statistics from the MOE show that last year, there were about 26,000 challenged students enrolled in inclusive classes ranging from preschool to high school.

As with special education in many places around the world, segregating challenged children in a parallel system was the primary mindset for quite a long time in Taiwan’s special education history. The earliest recorded instance of special education in Taiwan dates back to 1889, when the Rev. William Campbell of the Presbyterian Church set up a school in Tainan, southern Taiwan to teach visually impaired students the Bible, Braille and handicrafts. Several other schools for the blind and the deaf were set up in Taipei and Taichung, central Taiwan in the following decades. In 1956, the Christian Children’s Fund set up the Huei-Ming Home for Blind Children in Taichung. Now known as the Huei-Ming School, it is currently Taiwan’s only private school devoted to special education. Next to come was Renai Experimental School (now National Hemei Experimental School) in Changhua, central Taiwan, which was founded in 1967 to promote education for children with orthopedic impairments or cerebral palsy. Comparatively, special education for students with mental retardation had a late start in Taiwan, though its subsequent growth has been faster than other types of special education. It was not until 1976 that Taiwan’s first school for those with mental disabilities was set up in Tainan. Currently, there are nine special schools for students with mental retardation on the island.

Contributing to Society

Taiwan now has a total of 24 special education schools for approximately 6,500 children who suffer from disabilities in five categories—blindness, hearing impairment, mental retardation, orthopedic impairment and multiple disabilities. Hsiao Chin-tu, a professor at Southern Taiwan University’s Center for Teacher Education in Tainan County, notes that in addition to working to equip students with basic knowledge and the ability to handle daily life, special education schools also endeavor to help students understand and communicate with the rest of the world. “The ultimate goal is for them to fit in and contribute to society,” he says.

 

Visually impaired students demonstrate their talent in music. (Courtesy of Taipei School for the Visually Impaired)

Hsiao explains that as special education schools are specifically set up for students with severe disabilities, these challenged children are usually able to study with less stress because their schools offer specially designed teaching techniques and materials, trained teachers and classmates with similar disabilities. But educating students at schools reserved exclusively for challenged children also has weaknesses, one of the biggest being the lack of interaction between the students and the rest of society. Such interaction is highly desirable because it leads to greater mutual understanding. “Segregation due to the environment or over-protection brings unfamiliarity between special education kids and the outside world,” Hsiao says. “It’s possible that students from these schools won’t be able to fit into the normal world later because they lack social skills, so they become social outcasts.”

According to the MOE, Taiwan currently has about 93,000 challenged students in total enrolled in preschools, kindergartens and elementary, junior high, senior high and vocational schools. The island’s limited number of special education schools can only take 7 percent of all disabled students, while special classes in regular schools have been providing many more with educational opportunities. The first special class in a regular school was set up in 1962, when Taipei Municipal Zhongshan Elementary School opened a class for mentally challenged children. Currently, there are about 2,500 special classes with 60,000 students in Taiwan. These students are placed in different types of special classes according to their degree of disability. “Self-sufficient” classes are set up for disabled children for whom every class and activity must be specially designed, while students in the “resource” classes attend some regular classes, but also take part in specially designed classes taught by both in-school special education teachers and professionals circulating among schools.

Educators see the two decades starting from the establishment of the first such special class as the “experimental and promotion” stage of Taiwan’s special education development. For challenged children, efforts at this stage focused on research, diagnosis, evaluation and placement. Education for gifted children also started to attract notice at this stage when the MOE started to conduct research programs on educating gifted children from elementary through junior high school. Taiwan’s first experimental classes for gifted students were offered at two elementary schools in Taipei in 1963. Currently, there are about 45,000 gifted students in 1,800 classes from elementary school through high school.

Legal Framework

Whether for the challenged or for the gifted, Taiwan’s special education system was hampered for many years by its lack of a proper legal framework. Regulations governing special education were first established in 1968—about eight decades after the founding of Taiwan’s first special education school—in the Nine-Year National Education Implementation Statute, which stipulated that physically and mentally challenged and gifted children should be provided with special education or given adequate educational opportunities. It was not until 1984, when the Special Education Act was promulgated, that specific standards for regulating the promotion of special education and safeguarding students’ rights and interests were legally established.

 

Disabled and non-disabled students in an inclusive preschool class work together to make waffles. (Courtesy of Ministry of Education)

The act saw a few minor amendments over the years, but finally saw a major one in October 2009. “The passage of the amendment was a milestone in special education,” Legislator Chen Chiech-ju says of the 2009 revision. Chen—one of the most active proponents of the amendment—had been a legislator for only about a year when it was passed, but she has been a mother for more than three decades to a son with severe mental retardation, which was caused by an accident when he was six months old. She notes that the original Special Education Act was not specific enough and could no longer meet the demands of students with special needs due to the passage of time and changes in society, making a major amendment necessary.

One of the 2009 amendment’s most important improvements is increasing the central government’s funding for special education from 3 percent of its annual educational budget to 4.5 percent, or approximately NT$500 million (US$15.9 million). Other key revisions include more specific requirements for special education institutions, modified qualification requirements for teachers and other special education personnel, and a more active role for relevant government agencies. Under the amendment, for example, every city and county must set up at least one special education school branch or class, with the most severely disabled students given recruitment priority. Meanwhile, principals of these schools are required to demonstrate expertise in special education and must invite parents of special needs students to participate in the formulation of individualized education programs.

The MOE’s Lin Kun-tsan notes that special education in the public school system began being implemented in 1968 in elementary and junior high schools under the nine-year national education policy. The Special Education Act, Lin says, expands the coverage to preschool and requires that the government provide subsidies to private kindergartens and daycare centers that accept young children with disabilities. The MOE is also required to help local governments implement preschool special education programs. “Early treatment and early education matter a lot in the development of challenged children,” Lin says. “By pooling together educational, medical and social resources, we try to provide challenged children with a better chance to start early.”

Currently, there are about 10,000 children receiving preschool special education. One of the problems educators encounter in providing early treatment and education lies in “discovering” children with special needs. Some alert parents notice their children’s problems before they start school and make arrangements for special education. Failing that, teachers are tasked with identifying children with possible disabilities in their first semester under a standard operating procedure adopted by all kindergartens. Those children are recommended for further medical and educational evaluations to see if special education is needed. Some parents, however, refuse to take their children for further evaluation, or choose to believe that their children are just “late starters” and do not need special education. It is hard for any parent to accept that his or her child may have problems, but parents’ “false hope” can sometimes kill the opportunity for early intervention and thus a better outcome.

A Better Way

Today, about 97 percent of challenged preschool students are placed in classes in normal preschools, and many are placed in regular classes instead of special classes when they go on to elementary school. Tsai Chi-chen, an associate professor at Southern Taiwan University’s Department of Child Care, notes that bringing challenged children into the mainstream education system has been recognized by parents and educators as a better way to encourage their development, but warns that the route may not always be smooth.

 

The goal for special education is to help challenged students communicate with, fit in with and contribute to society. (Courtesy of Taipei School for the Visually Impaired)

She explains that such children, after being professionally evaluated as capable of entering the regular system, can only attend elementary schools in the district where they live, which limits their choices. Most parents inform the elementary schools about the “history” of their children and some schools handle the situation well, but for one reason or another, some schools, teachers, classmates and parents have problems accepting these children, even though they have been evaluated as capable of learning in the regular system. The result is that the children are sometimes isolated and treated differently, which leads them to becoming seen as “special” again. Tsai has taught inclusive kindergarten classes and has seen students who, after struggling in regular classes, asked to be placed in special classes once more. “It wipes out the entire efforts the children, their parents and teachers have made during preschool,” she says.

Just as Taiwan has expanded special education to include preschool children, it has also extended the system to cover older ones. The MOE launched a project in 2001 to encourage disabled students to go on to senior or vocational high school with tuition and fees waived. The MOE has also developed plans to increase compulsory education in Taiwan to 12 years. While the general outline of that plan has been decided upon, the timeline for its implementation remains uncertain. In 2007, in response to the looming 12-year policy, another plan was drawn up to help junior high school graduates with special needs gain admittance to vocational or high schools without having to take an entrance examination. Currently, there are about 4,200 students with special needs in special vocational or high schools and another 14,000 in regular vocational or high schools.

Last year, about 5,700 challenged students completed their vocational or high school education. To encourage such students to continue learning, they are provided with multiple options for admittance to schools of higher education. Different entrance examinations are held for students with different disabilities, while colleges and universities can hold their own entrance examinations for disabled students. Government subsidies are also provided to college and university resource centers that offer guidance and learning aids for challenged students. Currently, about 9,500 challenged students are receiving their higher education at colleges and universities.

Steady Progress

Lin Kun-tsan stresses that with the joint efforts of government authorities, educators, parental groups and social welfare organizations, Taiwan’s special education is making steady progress toward building a quality educational environment and providing challenged students with equal education opportunities. Given the opportunity, some challenged students may later become very successful in one area or another, just as with their non-disabled peers. And also just like the non-disabled, most challenged students will probably become nothing more—or less—than ordinary members of society, fulfilling their roles in a restaurant or convenience store. This route to simply becoming one of the ordinary majority is for sure bumpier for the challenged than for the non-disabled, but there is plenty of help available from caring people—people like those featured in Classmates.

Write to Jim Hwang at jim@mail.gio.gov.tw