What I Learned From APDEC In Taiwan
Chenyu Cai
This Summer time fleets away like a flash, taking a lot of my affection and memorizations away to the wind. However, what I still remember in mind is that precious time i spent in Holistic Education School in Miaoli, Taiwan. Every charming night with shining stars which can hardly been seen in modern city, cool beer and relaxed mood flourished with pleasant melody, excellent lectures and dialogues came out, numerous ideas exchanged among experts, students and parents... What a wonderful and meaningful journey those days.
Surrounded with natural forest, people here can see the sunrise and sunset almost every day. Holistic education school just located in such a beautiful and quiet place. In July 18th, the first Asia-Pacific Democratic Education Conference was held in this school, and people from different countries and areas, who were interested about Asia-Pacific Democratic Education, this time, got together. In the morning, we had some keynote speeches, and then started our Open Space freely. After our dinner, it was the exciting performance and open music time.
What impressed me a lot is that i found there were so many parents who entered to this pageant, they carried their little children and had a passion of offering them a better education environment and condition in future. I had a short interaction with a family of three in the dining room. Their daughter was already 5 years old but haven’t been to the kindergarten. They told me that they had a home schooling association and educated their children by themselves. However, this process underwent a series of difficulties and hardships, such as insufficient legal guarantee at the very start, a scarcity of resources and funds... They are still holding on to this greatness educational art.
And i also made good friends with the group member from South Korea. We took a tour to Fengyuan, biking through Dongfeng Green bikeway and had a leisure chatting time there. The young man i forget his name is a graduated student in the faculty of education and also a student teacher in democratic school in Korea. He thought that the experimental education reform now is flowing in his country, despite the prevailing traditional teaching, more people are striving for a new and better model or circumstance of education. What bring up our children without comparison is true education. As he said, today’s fury competition stress is overwhelming and conducting our kids as a test machine, not only in South Korea but the whole Asia area.
This reminded me about what Doctor Gray from Boston College had mentioned in his research and speech, Let children to play, explore, and pursue own interests with unlimited freedom. I think his proposition do a perfect match to the connotation of APDEC in some way. During this seven days, i saw so many people in different corner of the world are struggling for the prosperous of democratic education, to build a more bright education sketch plan for our children. The first APDEC in Taiwan really got our foot in the door of democratic education.
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