Dec. 4,2000 --- To: Chen Shui Bian

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Dear Chen Shui Bian,

I read a lot about your policy and I’d like to say thank you to take care of your country so well. You should know our French Prime minister, Lionel Jospin, as both of you could share many ideas. Moreover, you have the same style of governing and generating the same reactions within the public and medias. Who is not criticized when they fight to improve something?

You’d like to change Taiwan into a green Silicon Island. I also know that one of your aims is to increase the education expenses up to 7% of the GNP (within 2010), assumed both by public budget and private sector. In this mail, I’d like to give you my suggestions concerning these two substantial ideas.

As I have been teaching for two years in different schools in Taiwan and because every day I think about Taiwan and Taiwanese, let me tell you that the second measure will be efficient when pupils and students are taught more methods of acquiring knowledge efficiently.

Teachers and society are doing a lot to change children into smart and responsible adults. So why do most of pupils and students only pay attention on the things they learn until the days they have tests?

When teaching in France I observed this behavior, which is considered to be normal. But I compared how the children learn in both countries. It seems to me that more than anywhere, the children in this island receive a lot of pressure from their educators (family, schools). At the same time they don’t believe that the knowledge they learn is useful for their whole life. They concentrate a lot on the tests, on the scores. There’s much more competition between pupils and students here than in the western developed countries.

That’s one of the reasons for the adults’ world to be full of competition too. Some Taiwanese people who travel a lot for their job, especially people who went (or regularly go) to USA, discussed about that with me. In their viewpoint that’s also the reason why Taiwanese don’t respect each other. They try to be better than the others, and sometimes they even despise co-citizens.

Media and KMT’s bad attitude towards you and your party is due to:

The remaining black-gold politics that prevent subjective, corrupted media from telling the truth and informing people efficiently,

KMT’s defeat at the presidential election after 51 years of power,

Their inexperience in being an opposition force,

The competition I mentioned above and the difficulty for some Taiwanese to respect their co-citizens.

Western media are concerned about official and true information. That’s why they didn’t mention much about the actual political crisis.

Nevertheless, here in Taiwan, we should prevent this from happening again. How could that be done by an administration such as your, which cares a lot about the island’s future and tries to get a good economical development, serving people and environment (and not the opposite), for nowadays and the coming generations?

Exporting your voice in foreign countries, thanks to their media, should push the Taiwanese media towards a better attitude. Another way is to change the young generation’s style of learning.

By the way, pupils and students should learn more about civic knowledge (civic duties and rights). They should be given the concept of moral law, which is not known within most Taiwanese community.

Some outdoors activities led by schools (such as cleaning a street, a forest or a river, as it is the case in many foreign countries) would help them understand the importance of respecting their co-citizens as much as environment. Students would be happy because that day they would not go to school and foreign media would speak of Taiwan’s experience, which would give a better impression of the island.

I hope my ideas can serve you to work on the future of Taiwanese people and to show Asian countries that the island is a democratic model. I also hope to receive a feedback from you so as to be encouraged in my efforts to understand your society and help its improvement.

Yours sincerely,