Education as the Engine of Modernity: Pioneers in Schooling

Until the sixteenth century, the island of Taiwan was the homeland of Austronesian peoples.¹ The indigenous people of Taiwan do not have a native writing system, and the neighboring civilizations paid little attention to the island. In the critical era when the world had already entered the early modern period, most parts of the globe were linked by an expanding network of communication. The Chinese, the Japanese, and the Europeans on the Asian seas began to write their observations about isolated island of Taiwan and even colonized it. Taiwan’s entry into history is a phenomenon of globalization in the early modern era.
Modernity as such is a complex phenomenon, incorporating different concepts in different eras and places. If the colonization that the Europeans instituted in the Americas is a feature of early modernity, then the Hokkien and the Hakka from China colonized Taiwan. These groups arrived in Taiwan between the seventeenth and the nineteenth century, and their descendants form the majority of the population in contemporary Taiwan. However, if modernity is defined as Western lifestyle, technology, and institutions, this did not fully begin in Taiwan until the Qing Empire ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895. The modernity introduced by colonialism is called colonial modernity.²

The Taiwanese students at the Normal School were also pioneers. They were the first generation to adopt modern education and to reconcile the traditional and modern education systems in Taiwan. They usually entered tsu-pang 書房, or private traditional basic writing schools, to learn to read Chinese characters, to read the classical China’s elementary texts, and to write correspondences. These were essential skills for carrying on trade in pre-modern Taiwanese society. However, these students were also aware that learning Japanese in a modern school was the only way to succeed in colonial Taiwan. After acquiring sufficient Chinese skills in tsu-pang, they transferred to Japanese-taught primary schools before the age of 15 to continue their education under the modern curriculum. The best performing students would then enter the Normal School, one of the highest educational institutions available to Taiwanese youths in the early colonial era.⁶

Many graduates of the Normal School went on to become teachers in primary schools and spread modern ideas through their teaching. Some of them advanced into social elites who manifested a strong influence on Taiwanese society and struggled for civil rights in the colonial era. Some even extended their influence into the post-war era.⁷ These were the pioneering meritocratic elites in the modern Taiwanese society.

The Normal School was exclusively a boys’ school, but its affiliated schools enrolled girls as well. One of these affiliated schools later developed into the most prominent secondary school for girls in colonial Taiwan. Some of its graduates also devoted themselves to work in primary education, thus becoming the pioneering female professionals in Taiwan.⁸

My planned work is to fill this gap. Taking account of the Normal School/Taipei Normal as an apparatus of Taiwan’s modernization, I will trace how the development of this educational institution and its graduates established the education system of modern Taiwan, which transformed the island into a meritocratic society in the modern sense. In this new society, the Taiwanese sought to develop an education for promotion in the social hierarchy, for mobility in the modernizing world, and even for the struggle for cultural enlightenment, liberation, and civil rights. Scientific concepts, such as hygiene, modern agriculture, and precise time-keeping, entered ordinary Taiwanese minds through this school.¹² These transformations had led Taiwan to become a society distinct from its Chinese neighbor by 1945.

After World War II, the Nationalist government inherited the existing education system and utilized it to control bodies, languages, and thoughts. Taipei Normal became a model to perform such holistic control. Beyond the militarized dormitory life, the administration of education also included authoritarian agendas, such as developing a national spirit and bringing civil-military integration into the other normal schools’ disciplinary education.¹³ Students at Taipei Normal internalized these disciplinary tactics as habits, and when they became primary school teachers, they passed down this harsh discipline to the next generation. This phenomenon created docile bodies to serve an authoritarian regime. Although militarized discipline is a dark side in the history of Taipei Normal, it is a feature of modernity particular to the Cold War era. An investigation of its legacy in the democratized Taiwan is worth further consideration.

In short, the history of Taipei Normal embodies changes of the Taiwanese society in the course of nation-building after Taiwan’s separation from the Qing Empire. Due to its relationship to Taiwan’s modern history, a detailed longitudinal history of Taipei Normal will be a gateway to understanding the modernization of the island state.

To the joint project “Taiwan als Pionier,” the history of Taipei Normal will supplement a historical background to each postdoctoral researcher’s topic. With the curricula, graduates were trained to lay down the foundation of Taiwan’s scientific notions, and they contributed to the formation of a modern society during the first half of the twentieth century. Moreover, the experiences of switching twice to new rulers’ languages also left a strong impression on these intellectuals’ minds, and their literary creations represented these impressions. Nevertheless, because language education has always been at the core of Taipei Normal’s curriculum, the transformed National Taipei University of Education is adapting this legacy to fulfill the demands of teaching languages to different target groups in Taiwan. The challenges include instruction in national languages (such as Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, and Formosan indigenous languages) and teaching new immigrants’ mother tongues to students. Such transformations echo the agenda to incorporate Taiwan into the developing new order in the Indo-Pacific region. Now is the time to reflect on the history of Taiwan’s modernization, and Taipei Normal is its embodiment.