Taiwan’s New Citizenship Curriculum: Changes and Challenges

Every curriculum has a particular educational function that upholds the values of educational developers and society at large. In the past, due to the military confrontation between the two sides bordering the Taiwan Strait and its concerns over national security, Taiwan developed a very rigid, centralised school curriculum to control educational processes and practices. After the suspension of martial law in 1987 and the subsequent advent of free speech and a free press, increasing public criticism has been made of Taiwan’s education for its inflexibility and for failing to cope with the particular needs of Taiwan’s rapidly changing society. In response to public expectations and national development needs, the Ministry of Education (MOE) has adopted some measures to deal with problems in different aspects of the educational system. The development of a curriculum for citizenship education, i.e., the nine-year integrated curriculum for social studies, is one of those measures. This new curriculum not only redefines the field of citizenship education at the elementary and junior high school levels, but also changes dramatically what the field used to be in terms of scope and sequence, school and classroom practice, and the like.

This chapter seeks to explore Taiwan’s citizenship curriculum development, implementation and major challenges, focusing on the elementary and junior high school levels. The analysis presented in this chapter encompasses five critical aspects. First, the analysis inquires into the contexts and underlying values of citizenship curriculum in Taiwan. Second, the analysis of the development of citizenship curriculum distinguishes between three periods and discusses these in turn. Third, the analysis examines the implementation of the current citizenship curriculum reform. Fourth, it focuses on the controversies and challenges confronting Taiwan’s new citizenship curriculum. Finally, suggestions are made regarding what needs to be done in citizenship education in order to help resolve the above issues.