Taiwan Indigenous Education and Language Revival: Elementary Schools Hold the Line, Middle Schools Fail to Catch

30-second overview: In 2012, Paiwan teacher Camake Valaule at Taimali Elementary School in Pingtung led his ancient songs choir to win the Best Traditional Music Performance Award at the 23rd Golden Melody Awards with the album Where Song Begins.¹ In 2017, the Indigenous Peoples Language Development Act passed the Legislative Yuan's third reading, formally elevating 16 indigenous languages to the status of national languages.² In 2019, the amended Indigenous Peoples Education Act wrote into Article 34 a "ten-year target" for the proportion of indigenous teachers at indigenous key schools.³ As of the 111th academic year, there were 38 indigenous experimental schools across Taiwan.⁴ But this seemingly dense and comprehensive system suddenly breaks down at the middle school level. A 2024 in-depth investigation by The Reporter pointed out: "Since 2019, the number of indigenous experimental elementary schools has increased by more than 10, while middle schools have nearly stagnated."⁵ There are only 6 indigenous experimental middle schools in all of Taiwan.⁴ In the 112th academic year, the gross enrollment rate for indigenous college students was 56.3%, compared to 91.6% for general students — a gap of 35.3 percentage points.⁶ The state spent ten years using law to protect a child's language and culture, then let go of his hand the day he entered middle school. Camake passed away on August 19, 2021, from lymphoma at age 42.⁷ The ancient songs choir he left behind remains, but who will guard this transition now that he is gone?

One Teacher and the 40 Ancient Songs He Collected

To understand why the first half of Taiwan's indigenous education over the past decade was "very successful," one must first understand Camake Valaule.

He was born in 1979 in the Paiwan community of Danlin Village, Laiyi Township, Pingtung County, and later became the director of instruction and physical education teacher at Taimali Elementary School.¹ In the early 2000s, he began doing something no one asked him to do: he would visit elders at their homes with a voice recorder, capture the melodies they sang, note down the meaning of each line, and return home to practice repeatedly.¹ This is how he learned more than forty Paiwan ancient songs.

Taimali Elementary School suffered severe damage from the 2009 Typhoon Morakot and relocated to its current site.⁸ In the upheaval of the relocation, Camake continued singing with the children. In 2006, the ancient songs choir was first nominated for the Golden Melody Awards with Sing a Beautiful Song.¹ In 2012, they won the Best Traditional Music Performance Award at the 23rd Golden Melody Awards with Where Song Begins.¹ In 2014, they won the Best Indigenous Language Album Award at the 25th Golden Melody Awards with Song Flying Over the Mountains.¹ Taimali Elementary School thus earned its place on Taiwan's cultural map.

This sounds like an inspirational story. But it simultaneously reveals a fact deeper than inspiration: by the 2000s, the transmission of indigenous languages could no longer be accomplished by families alone. Camake needed a voice recorder, the elders' time, school support, and government recognition. He spent more than a decade of personal effort filling the void left by the collapse of family-based transmission.⁹ He was the exception, not the norm. Most Paiwan children would not have a teacher like Camake, and if their indigenous language was not caught by formal curricula at the elementary level, it was essentially severed.

This is the context for what Taiwan's Legislative Yuan did in 2017.

2017–2019: Three Laws in Three Years

On June 14, 2017, the Legislative Yuan passed the Indigenous Peoples Language Development Act in its third reading.² The first article states clearly: "Indigenous peoples' languages are national languages." This was a historic formulation, elevating 16 ethnic groups' approximately 26 languages from "minority family languages" to the same national language status as Mandarin and Taiwanese.²

In the five years after the law took effect, the Council of Indigenous Peoples accomplished the following:¹⁰

• Indigenous language promotion staff expanded from 0 to 150, stationed in indigenous areas to provide language services
• 55 indigenous areas and 74 regional common languages were officially designated
• 24 indigenous township offices were promoted to use indigenous writing systems in official documents
• The indigenous language development budget grew from approximately NT$120 million before 2017 to NT$550 million, nearly quadrupling in 5 years¹⁰
• 7 indigenous language learning centers opened, 24 universities and colleges received subsidies to offer indigenous language courses, and 53 indigenous language kindergartens were established¹⁰

On May 24, 2019, the Legislative Yuan passed a substantially revised version of the Indigenous Peoples Education Act.³ Article 34 made an unprecedented commitment: "Principals and teachers of indigenous key schools shall prioritize the appointment of those with knowledge of indigenous culture and language; and shall hire teachers with indigenous identity in proportion to the ratio of indigenous students to total students; where this ratio is below one-third, it shall be achieved within ten years of the amendment of this Act."³

In plain language: by 2029, indigenous key schools across Taiwan must have at least 1/3 indigenous teachers. This is the target the law set for schools in the field.

On February 21, 2020, the Ministry of Education published Regulations for Public Senior High Schools and Below to Conduct Indigenous Peoples Experimental Education for Partial Classes,¹¹ allowing ordinary schools to establish standalone indigenous experimental classes (rather than transforming the entire school), with curricula exempt from the prescribed courses and hours of the 108 Curriculum Guidelines. These regulations, combined with the School-Type Experimental Education Implementation Act passed in 2014,¹² opened a flexible space for ethnic experimental education.

Three laws in three years. This was an unusually intense period of legislative reform in Taiwan's educational history. During 2017–2020, if you were an indigenous education worker, you would have felt that the state finally saw you.

The Explosion of Experimental Education at the Elementary Level

Law's downstream is numbers.

After the School-Type Experimental Education Implementation Act passed in 2014, the pace of transformation at indigenous schools accelerated noticeably during 2017–2020. Data from the Ministry of Education's Department of Statistics:¹³

• 108th academic year (2019–20): 25 elementary and middle schools conducting ethnic experimental education, 1,640 students participating (1,482 with indigenous identity)
• 110th academic year (2021–22): 36 (total of 114 experimental education schools nationwide, with indigenous schools comprising nearly one-third)⁴
• 111th academic year (2022–23): 38⁴

From 25 to 38 is +13, a 50% increase in three years. This is a real expansion. Behind each newly established indigenous experimental school is a curriculum that was redesigned, a cohort of teachers retrained, and a community of parents persuaded to let their children take this different path.

But the distribution of these 38 schools warrants a closer look:⁴

• Elementary schools: 32
• Elementary-middle combined / Middle schools: 6

Elementary schools account for 32; middle schools have only 6. This ratio is the key to understanding the central contradiction of this article. The only places in Taiwan that can offer indigenous experimental middle school education are six: Datong Middle School (Nantou), Jianshi Middle School (Hsinchu), Hoping Middle School (Taichung), Alishan Elementary-Middle School (Chiayi), Palumayan Tribal School (Kaohsiung), and Lanyu High School (Taitung).⁴

A child who attended Taimali Elementary School's full-immersion Paiwan language program and graduates from sixth grade — if they want to continue on the path of ethnic education — their choices are: move to one of those six schools in Nantou, Hsinchu, Taichung, Chiayi, Kaohsiung, or Taitung. Otherwise, they must return to a mainstream middle school, where they must translate six years of language habits built in their indigenous language back into Mandarin.

Palumayan: A School Born of Disaster Relocation

Of the six indigenous experimental middle schools, the story of Palumayan Tribal School is the most dramatic.

Palumayan's predecessor was Namasia Ethnic Elementary School, located in a Bunun community in Namasia District, Kaohsiung.¹⁴ In August 2009, Typhoon Morakot caused severe damage to Namasia District, forcing Ethnic Elementary School to leave its homeland.¹⁴ The path it took thereafter:

1. Two and a half years of temporary schooling in a historic campus in Qishan
2. Relocated to Ethnic Aiguo Elementary School in Shanlin District (within a permanent housing community rebuilt by the government)
3. In 2017 (106th academic year), transformed into a "Bunun; multi-ethnic" indigenous experimental school, renamed Palumayan Tribal Elementary School
4. In 2019 (108th academic year), reorganized as an elementary-middle school, pursuing the goal of 12-year integrated ethnic experimental education

Palumayan's curriculum design centers on the Bunun traditional "millet culture."¹⁴ The school developed a "Four Festivals, Four Competencies" talent cultivation curriculum, combining four traditional Bunun festivals (millet land-clearing festival, millet sowing festival, harvest festival, baby festival) to cultivate four competencies: cultural competency, scientific competency, aesthetic competency, and college-preparatory competency.¹⁴

This is currently the only indigenous school in Taiwan practicing 12-year integrated ethnic experimental education. It can do this because it is an integrated elementary-middle school where students from first through ninth grade complete their education in the same school, under the same curriculum, accompanied by the same teachers. But Palumayan can only catch students through ninth grade. After ninth grade, students still have to leave this system to attend a mainstream high school or one of the other five indigenous experimental middle schools.

One specific number makes this gap more stark: Palumayan Tribal School has a total enrollment of about 100 students.¹⁵ This scale is the reason it can achieve deep cultural integration, and also the reason it cannot be replicated and expanded. 12-year integrated ethnic experimental education is a rare species that can only be born from geographic conditions, community support, and the political opportunity created by post-disaster reconstruction.

The Word _The Reporter_ Used: Gap

In 2024, The Reporter published an in-depth investigation: "Ethnic Education Falling into a Transitional Gap? Indigenous Experimental Middle Schools Navigate Adversity."⁵ The reporters' observation was direct:

"Since 2019, the number of indigenous experimental elementary schools has increased by more than 10, while middle schools have nearly stagnated."⁵

Teachers at indigenous experimental middle schools interviewed in the report said they sustained the continuity of cultural curricula through cross-grade team collaboration, but "cannot sustain this on passion alone" — institutional administrative support is needed.⁵ The report's conclusion was that achieving sustainable indigenous education requires a complete indigenous education transition system that allows students to become the subjects of their own cultural learning, rather than being defined from the outside.⁵

Why can elementary schools expand so dramatically while middle schools stagnate? The answer involves several layers of structural reasons:⁵¹⁶

First layer: teacher training structure. Elementary teachers can be relatively easily trained as indigenous language teachers, because the division of subjects at the elementary level is not strict — one teacher can simultaneously cover Mandarin, indigenous language, and life skills. Middle school teacher training is divided by subject expertise: math teachers, science teachers, history teachers each have their own curriculum and materials. Requiring them to simultaneously teach in an indigenous language is exponentially more difficult work.

Second layer: college entrance pressure. Middle school is a critical stage for college preparation, and parents' anxiety about "whether studying math in an indigenous language will affect college admission" far exceeds that at the elementary level. Even parents who are themselves indigenous will worry about whether their children can keep up with the mainstream system in high school and college.

Third layer: curriculum design. The middle school portion of the 108 Curriculum Guidelines is highly subject-oriented. For ethnic experimental middle schools to design curricula that retain cultural content while connecting to mainstream materials requires enormous amounts of time and professional teaching staff. This work cannot be accomplished by a single school independently — it requires systemic support from institutions at the level of the National Academy for Educational Research's Indigenous Peoples Education Research Center.¹⁷

Fourth layer: political will. Ethnic experimental education at the elementary level does not provoke much controversy, because parents generally agree that "children learning some indigenous language is good." But at the middle school level, involving college preparation, academics, and future prospects, differences of opinion between parents and schools become more pronounced, and the government becomes more cautious in promotion.

Four layers of difficulty compounded produce that gap between 38 and 6.

The Cliff at the College Level

The gap at the middle school level is only the first half. At the college level, the disparity deepens further.

The Ministry of Education's Department of Statistics overview of indigenous students for the 112th academic year shows:⁶

• Gross enrollment rate for indigenous college students: 56.3%
• Gross enrollment rate for general students: 91.6%
• Gap: 35.3 percentage points

"Gross enrollment rate" means: how many people in the age group expected to be enrolled are actually enrolled. For every 100 college-age indigenous youth, 56.3 are in college; for every 100 general college-age youth, 91.6 are in college. The gap reaches 35.3 percentage points — more than one-third of indigenous youth are simply absent at the college level.

Another figure from the 111th academic year: indigenous student withdrawal and dropout numbers at colleges and universities are each approximately 3,000-plus.⁶ An ETtoday report from 2020 recorded the top three reasons indigenous college students withdrew or dropped out: work needs 24.6%, incompatible interests 13.8%, financial difficulty 9.2%.¹⁸ That is, the most common reason for withdrawal is "I need to go work," not "I can't keep up academically." This directly reflects disparities in family economic circumstances.¹⁸

These figures make the good intentions of "10–35% bonus points for college admission" appear somewhat tragic. Indigenous students are admitted to college with bonus points, but once there, economic conditions do not allow them to continue studying. A 2020 United Daily News series "Bonus Points Become 'Shackles'" documented this phenomenon: 35% bonus points let children from tribal communities go from rural middle schools to elite high schools in Taipei, New Taipei, and Taichung — but once there, they face a completely different competitive logic, cost of living, commute distances, and social norms than their villages.¹⁹ The result is a withdrawal rate climbing to twice that of general students.

Awi Mona: Walking Through Two Decades, With One More to Go

This transitional gap was not discovered today.

Awi Mona (Tsai Chih-wei) is a Truku/Seediq scholar, Taiwan's first indigenous law PhD, and an associate professor and director of the Graduate Institute of Financial and Economic Law at National Dong Hwa University.²⁰ His paper "Walking Through Two Decades: A Review and Prospect of the Indigenous Peoples Education Act," published in the National Chengchi University Law Review, is one of the most important academic reviews in the field of indigenous education law.²¹

Awi Mona divides the institutional evolution of Taiwan's indigenous education into several stages:²¹

• Authoritarian period: The state adopted an "assimilation" policy toward indigenous peoples; the education system's purpose was to turn indigenous students into "Mandarin-speaking citizens of the Republic of China"
• 1998 first enactment of the Indigenous Peoples Education Act: The state began to acknowledge that indigenous peoples have independent educational rights
• 2004 first revision: Strengthening the indigenous education administrative system
• 2019 second major revision: Adding specific provisions on teacher ratios, ethnic experimental education, and an indigenous education research center

"Two decades" refers to the 21 years from 1998 to 2019. Awi Mona's assessment of this period is that legal provisions have become increasingly complete, but the subjectivity of indigenous education has never truly been realized.²¹ The key reasons are unclear division of responsibilities among the Ministry of Education, the Council of Indigenous Peoples, and schools, plus a lack of long-term tracking evaluation mechanisms.²¹

A core claim in his paper is: indigenous education should not be treated as "remedial mainstream education" but as "a parallel, autonomous educational system."²¹ This claim aligns with Palumayan's 12-year integrated practice, with The Reporter's observation of a "transitional gap," and with the elementary-to-middle school discrepancy I described in the first half of this article — they are different expressions of the same proposition. If indigenous education can only exist at the elementary level, it means it is merely a "delay-assimilation buffer," not a truly parallel system.

To build a truly parallel system, middle school, high school, and college must all be filled in. Otherwise, children who did well in the elementary stage will be like graduates of Taimali Elementary School: they complete elementary school, return to mainstream middle school, indigenous language becomes a memory, and college entrance pulls them along.

The Ten-Year Target, Three Years Remaining

The ten-year deadline of Article 34 of the Indigenous Peoples Education Act begins from the 2019 amendment.³ That means: by 2029, indigenous key schools across Taiwan must achieve a 1/3 proportion of indigenous teachers.

The figure for the 107th academic year was that only 80 of 360 key schools had met the target (22.22%).¹³ I could not find publicly released updated figures for 2023 or 2024 — the statistics pages of the Council of Indigenous Peoples and Ministry of Education mainly remain between academic years 107–110.²² This is itself a warning sign: a ten-year commitment, with no publicly available achievement tracking dashboard at the five-year mark, is a serious signal for a policy targeting 2029.

If the achievement rate has not risen significantly from the 22.22% in 2018, then with three years remaining to reach 33%, this would mean roughly 4% more key schools need to reach the target each year. With 360 schools, that means 14 more schools achieving the target per year, 42 more in three years. Can the number of new indigenous teachers the Ministry of Education trains each year sustain this figure? This question requires annual tracking to answer, and annual tracking currently does not exist.

Camake Is Gone, the Children Remain

On August 19, 2021, Camake Valaule passed away from lymphoma in Pingtung at age 42.⁷

When he left, Taimali Elementary School's ancient songs choir remained. In 2023, he was posthumously awarded the Special Music Award at the 34th Traditional Arts Golden Melody Awards.¹ In 2024, the choir fulfilled his dying wish, performing at Taipei 101.²³ The ancient songs Camake recorded are still being learned and sung by new children. But the work he personally devoted more than a decade to — catching the language on the verge of disappearing, one phrase at a time from elders — was not automatically taken over by the school system. Every indigenous experimental school is doing something similar within its own scope, but there is no national-level system doing cross-school, cross-grade, cross-subject integration.

This is where it is truly difficult at the intersection of indigenous education and language revitalization. It is not a lack of laws, not a lack of budget, not a lack of teachers' passion — all these were substantially addressed in 2017–2020. What is missing is a transition system that can connect elementary school, middle school, high school, college, community, family, society, and employment into one whole. Until this system appears, individual teachers, individual schools, and individual children will continue to fill systemic gaps with individual effort — like Camake.

There was only one Camake, and he only lived 42 years.

If this article from Taiwan.md can be read, I hope it is read this way: the next time you see a news story about "an indigenous high school student giving up bonus points to return to the community," or a story about "some indigenous experimental school being merged out of existence," don't rush to frame it as an inspirational story or a personal choice. Behind that news is a signal that a ten-year promise written in 2019 is quietly running late.

Camake is gone, the children remain, the gap remains, and the ten-year deadline has fewer than three years left. Who will guard this transition? That is the question for the next decade.

Further Reading

• Taiwan Indigenous Language Revitalization Movement — The language half of this article's story. Full context on Thao language with only 4 native speakers, the 2017 Indigenous Peoples Language Development Act's third reading, language nests, and Taimali Elementary School's full immersion teaching — complementing this article's focus on educational rights.
• Teach For Taiwan (TFT) — TFT's ten-year organizational history, including the 3A framework (Access/Achievement/Aspiration) and the shortage of teachers in remote areas. This article's perspective echoes TFT's concentric circle framework, but shifts the focus from rural education generally to the specifics of indigenous education.
• Rural Education in Taiwan (台灣偏鄉教育, zh only) — The full version of TFT's concentric circle framework. Indigenous education is the sharpest sub-case under the umbrella of rural education, with the added axis of language revitalization.
• Act for the Development of Education in Remote Area Schools (偏遠地區學校教育發展條例全解, zh only) — This legal analysis and this article's Indigenous Peoples Education Act are two parallel branches of the same rural education system: the Act handles geographic/economic dimensions, the indigenous education law handles ethnic/cultural dimensions. Reading both together gives the complete picture.
• Taiwan's 16 Indigenous Peoples Cultural Map — The geographic, linguistic, and demographic distribution of the 16 groups, grounding the figure of "360 indigenous key schools" in specific mountains and seas.
• Taiwan's Indigenous Peoples History and Naming Rights Movement — The legal identity evolution from "mountain compatriots" to "indigenous peoples." Without the naming rights movement, there is no Indigenous Peoples Education Act — this is the upstream of the entire educational rights discourse.
• Indigenous Land Justice and Traditional Territories — Language, education, and land are three faces of the same thing. Reading all three articles together allows one to understand why "keeping children in the community" is directly related to ethnic survival.
• Education System and Admissions Culture — When all of Taiwanese society treats college entrance as the only path to success, how does the good intention of bonus points become another force of single-track conformity.

References