Baker et al. (2001) offered a hypothesis of ‘enrichment’ and ‘remedial’ strategies in order to account for the participation in supplementary education, as described in Chapter 2 above. Their hypothesis attempted to make sense of the phenomenon of supplementary education on an international level, based on data from TIMMS. One central question in this research is therefore whether the supplementary education phenomenon in Taiwan follows a similar pattern, or whether the Taiwanese context requires a modified explanation. It is perhaps easy to find examples which support the presence of either enrichment or remedial strategies at work in the Taiwanese
educational setting, but it is another to suggest a causal link between these examples and the scale of supplementary education witnessed in Taiwan. In terms of the ‘enrichment’ strategy, in which intense competition for educational opportunities is seen as the major factor which encourages the participation in supplementary education, Baker et al. mention the existence of a ‘tight connection between elite universities and excellent labour market opportunities in Taiwan’, and the present research has also provided a body of responses in both interview and student survey data which support the existence of a competitive educational environment. Taiwanese parents demonstrably have high expectations of their children’s academic performance, and this is partly due to the common perceptions of the need for good educational performance to ensure good future job prospects.
However, in the case of Taiwan, along with other Confucian-Heritage countries in East Asia, the present research suggests that the comparative strength of this ‘enrichment’ strategy is not necessarily a product of a competitive education market, but reflects much deeper cultural values and orientations toward education and family relationships. The honour a child’s success in the competition for a prestigious university place brings to his or her family is a recurring theme in the interviews, and underlines the special cultural value of education in the Taiwanese context. In this sense, the phenomenon of supplementary education in Taiwan may follow a different pattern to that found in other parts of the world. Bray (2010), reviewing research on the growth of shadow education, also comments on how, in comparison to Western trends in education, where moves
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toward school ranking systems and increasing competitiveness have been accompanied by increased use of tutoring, the particular vigour of East Asian shadow education reflects the common Confucian heritage values of learning, effort, and competition, and thus show a different pattern.
The growth of supplementary education under the ‘remedial’ hypothesis is related to the increasing importance of educational qualifications as basic criteria in society and employment. Here the aim is not to be educational high-fliers, but rather just to avoid being left by the wayside, without the basic school qualifications necessary for future employment or progress through the educational system. Participation in supplementary education is seen as a response to a struggle to maintain a basic functional survival in the educational system, and there are many references in the present research which allude to the ‘fear of failure’ or the ‘fear of losing at the starting line’, with many parents anxious about their children’s struggles within the competitive schooling atmosphere. A number of respondents mentioned the fear of failure as a motivator for participation in supplementary education, and interviewees occasionally referred to the ‘M-shaped’ or ‘twin-peak’ attainment distribution among Taiwanese school students, and the fear of lapsing into the bottom part of the distribution pattern. Supplementary education can here be seen as an attempt by parents to ensure that their children are not abandoned by the competitive system, and that their school performance can attain, at least, a minimally acceptable level for satisfactory progress.
Thus the observations in this research concerning the highly competitive education system and employment market can be cited to support a mixture of both ‘enrichment’ and ‘remedial’ strategies as being important in the decisions behind choosing to participate in supplementary education in Taiwan. However, the present research has also thrown up a large amount of data which suggests that different factors are also important in reaching a better understanding of the rationale for supplementary education in Taiwan, and while the competitive elements discussed here are evidently relevant to the scale and nature of the phenomenon, it is perhaps the simultaneous alignment of a number of additional factors which has created the large investment in supplementary education witnessed in this research.
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Beyond the competitive atmosphere for education and employment, with educational attainment being seen as a crucial key to ensuring good job prospects, there is also the high importance placed on educational attainment for social status within a Chinese cultural system, which tends to amplify the already competitive atmosphere by increasing the educational stakes for children and families in the society. These two factors working in tandem can be seen to heighten families’ demands for good academic performance in their children. The interview data revealed a number of themes which support the cultural importance of education, including the consistently high academic expectations of a considerable proportion of parents, and the frequent references to honour or social status being linked to children’s efforts and performance in the competitive educational atmosphere. Thus, it is not merely a minority elite of parents who strive for the best academic performance from, and opportunities for their children, but rather the educational attainment demand seems to be a more general property of a majority of parents encountered in the research. The demand for good academic performance is thus both for pragmatic reasons of increasing the chances of being competitive, and also for more sociocultural reasons of ensuring status and honour within the traditional Chinese family system. It is therefore a common alignment of these competitive and cultural factors which can be seen to be at work in driving the supplementary education market in Taiwan.
It may be that these two principal factors are sufficient to account for the phenomenon as observed in this research. However, there are also other contending factors which may be incorporated into this mix, and which drive the supplementary education phenomenon even further in the same direction. In terms of educational organization, there are structural effects on the educational system in Taiwan in which uncertainties surrounding policy and curriculum change on one hand, and a bifurcation of the system into mainstream and supplementary schooling on the other hand, which together tend to make the choice to participate in supplementary education the default choice for parents and children, so that it is no longer seen as something ‘supplementary’ at all. Instead of being forced to rationalize reasons for asking children to attend extensive hours at
anqinbans and buxibans, it is rather that parents need to come up with convincing
reasons for not sending their children to extra classes. In a sense, we can see that the system tends to set supplementary education as a major pillar of the system, and that
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having invested so much in this sector, the mainstream education system has been forced to adapt to the bifurcation. There are clear examples in this research of how the mainstream school teachers see their role as having been transformed by the presence of external influences. While buxibans are seen as responsible to some extent for ensuring that children keep up with coursework and grade performance, the elementary school teachers may tend to see their purpose moving more in the direction of engaging with social and moral behaviour issues, and perhaps even in dealing with some of the fallout from having children exposed to an extensive ‘spoon-fed’ and narrowly academic regimen of learning.
The social and cultural importance of education for families has been mentioned above, and this element also leads to another factor which further gives supplementary
education an added boost. The research has confirmed that much of the strategy to participate in supplementary education is centred on the parents, rather than on the children. Buxibans and anqinbans are not so much a response of children to motivation in learning, but rather a response of parents to their ideas about how they want their children to behave, and about what they want their children to strive for.
Acknowledging the considerations of traditional Confucian thought, parents have a duty to ensure that their children perform as well as possible in the educational sphere, and children have a duty to obey their parents in their demands. Following this scenario, the supplementary education option offers parents a way of putting their Confucian duty into practice, and equally a way for children to act out their obedience. The structure of specialized premises provided by buxibans and anqinbans to organize the behaviour of school homework and extended revision and practice can be seen to carry the traditional burden of Chinese parents in ensuring that their children are focused on study. The relatively high level of involvement of Chinese parents in their children’s education is a strong theme in this research, and the supplementary education establishments offer a relatively easy way for parents, albeit by proxy, to fulfill their responsibilities in this regard.
Beyond this basic function of supplementary education as offering the services of structuring children’s study time, there is also a suggestion in this research that although the parents go along with the traditional Confucian concept of parental duty, there are
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significant barriers for many parents in fulfilling this traditional role, and that
supplementary education has prospered in the face of a relative diminution of traditional roles. With increased uncertainty in educational programmes, and also in response to the increasing influence of Western-inspired patterns of both parenting and education, in which increasing amounts of choice and autonomy in learning are changing the social and educational landscape, it may also be that the traditional parent-child relationship is under pressure. Under these circumstances, parents may find that the traditional roles are difficult to sustain, and that the role of supplementary education is in fact to bolster these traditional roles where the power of the family is under pressure. The increase in exposure to foreign media, the liberalization of education, the changing attitudes toward discipline, and the down-playing of traditional Confucian values in schooling, have meant that the traditional structures of hierarchy and authority have been challenged to some extent, and while families may still hold on to the concept of honour as important in the pursuit of their children’s education, the traditional methods of parenting may not be as easy to apply in contemporary society as they were in previous generations. Thus we find that supplementary education offers families a way to maintain an element of control over children in their educational programme, which previously would have been carried out at home by parents and other members of extended family.
The above discussion may suggest that the demonstration of performance attainments in education is emphasized over intrinsic learning motivation in Taiwanese families. However, the present research has also pointed to clear mastery-oriented learning goals, particularly in the responses of many students who described the complementary or long-term learning benefits of attending supplementary English education. In addition to these reports, the achievement goal orientation survey also hinted at the high level of reported mastery-approach goal orientation in Taiwanese university undergraduates, which also suggests that educational goals are not limited to success in high stakes tests. For the case of English language learning, a clear motivation for attendance in
supplementary classes is the desire to improve language skills which are seen as
valuable resources in a globalized society, and represent important tools in international communication, both in the field of employment and also in a more social sphere.
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