Where Did Taiwan's Moral Education Go: A Cancelled Class and Two Decades of Unclaimed Responsibility

30-Second Overview: In 1993 and 1994, the Ministry of Education cancelled the standalone subjects of "Morality and Health" in elementary schools and "Citizenship and Morality" in junior high schools, respectively, folding moral education into the seven learning areas of the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum. But this cancellation was carried out without any prior discussion on whether moral education should continue, and without any investigation into the effectiveness of existing moral education programs. A 2001 survey by the King Car Education Foundation found that 78% of elementary school teachers believed moral education was what most needed strengthening. More than two decades later, moral education in Taiwan's curriculum has become a no-man's-land that "everyone thinks is important, but no one feels responsible for."

The Era of a Weekly Central Virtue

Anyone in Taiwan over forty probably remembers one thing: in elementary school, there was a "central virtue" each week.

It might be honesty, punctuality, or responsibility. The teacher would announce the week's virtue at the Monday morning assembly, and the entire week's life education revolved around it. This system came from the Ministry of Education's prescribed "Eighteen Central Virtues," paired with dedicated courses—"Morality and Health" (elementary) and "Citizenship and Morality" (junior high)—with fixed class periods, textbooks, and exams¹.

Whether a weekly virtue could actually raise morally sound children is certainly debatable. But at least in that era, "morality" had a clear place in school: someone was responsible to teach it, there was time allocated for it, and there were materials to use.

Then it was cancelled.

How It Was Cancelled: No Discussion, No Investigation

In the 2001 academic year, Taiwan began implementing the "Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum for Elementary and Junior High Schools" starting from first grade. The new curriculum consolidated the previously separate subject structure into seven major learning areas: Language; Health and Physical Education; Social Studies; Arts and Humanities; Mathematics; Science and Technology; and Integrated Activities¹.

Among these seven areas, the former elementary "Morality and Health" and junior high "Citizenship and Morality" were conspicuously absent. Moral education was declared to have been "infused" into each learning area.

It should be noted that the old "Citizenship and Morality" course was not a neutral space for moral education. Its predecessor can be traced back to the "Party Principles" subject (teaching the Three Principles of the People) promulgated by the Nationalist government in 1928, renamed "Citizenship" in 1932, and merged with "Citizenship Training" in 1962. During the martial law period, the primary goal of the citizenship curriculum was to promote a Greater China ideology rooted in the Three Principles of the People, instilling national spirit, patriotic education, the Four Virtues and Eight Ethics, and Chinese cultural content². In 1995, the Three Principles of the People was removed from the university entrance exam, and in 2006, the high school "Three Principles of the People" course was officially renamed "Citizenship and Society"³. In other words, the old "Citizenship and Morality" carried the political imprint of the authoritarian era—a context that cannot be ignored when discussing its disappearance.

But even accounting for that political context, the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum's handling of moral education's place in 2001 remained problematic. Educational philosophy scholar Li Feng-ju pointed out in a 2004 study that the curriculum never discussed whether moral education should be implemented for elementary and junior high students, nor conducted any empirical investigation into its effectiveness, before abruptly cancelling the newly revised "Morality and Health" and "Citizenship and Morality" curricula that had only been announced in 1993 and 1994, respectively¹.

In other words, removing the political indoctrination elements from the old curriculum was reasonable, but discarding along with it the question of "how moral education should have its own place in the new system" was not. This decision did not come from a deliberated conclusion that "everyone agreed it was unnecessary"—it was quietly removed amid the structural adjustments of curriculum reform.

The Result of "Infusion": The Word "Morality" Barely Appears in Nearly 60 Pages of Guidelines

The new curriculum advocated integrating moral education into all subject learning areas, but this claim immediately ran into two dilemmas¹.

The first was at the theoretical level. The Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum was influenced by postmodernist thought, emphasizing anti-foundationalism, anti-authoritarianism, and pluralism. Under this framework, people grew increasingly skeptical and distrustful of the "foundations of morality." Chang Hsiu-hsiung noted that the curriculum goals of the "Social Studies" learning area in the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum seemed to convey messages of "value neutrality" and "ethical freedom," with almost no mention of inheriting traditional cultural values and virtues¹.

More specifically, the six major themes of the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum (information, environment, gender, human rights, career development, home economics, etc.) did not include "morality" as a key theme. Even in the provisional guidelines, the "Social Studies" learning area—the one most closely related to moral education—avoided the word "morality" almost entirely across its nearly 60 pages of explanatory text¹.

Educational scholar Chang Hsiu-hsiung called this a "moral education crisis": such a "morality-deficient" curriculum was highly likely to mislead teachers and students into thinking that since learning areas, core competencies, and major themes made no mention of morality, moral education must be unnecessary¹.

The second dilemma was at the practical level. The "infusion" model resembles the Western "values across the curriculum" approach. It assumes moral education is the responsibility of all teachers. Language class can discuss the ethics of abortion; social studies class can discuss law and human rights⁴.

This sounds ideal. But British educational philosopher R. Straughan had long pointed out two fundamental problems with this model: first, how can we ensure that all teachers, on top of their primary subject teaching, also pay sufficient attention to the moral dimensions of their learning area? Second, even if teachers do notice, since moral education itself involves related doctrines in moral philosophy, requiring specialized knowledge and methods for teaching and learning, how can we ensure teachers can properly handle various moral issues in the classroom⁴?

Without teachers' attention and professional support, moral education would effectively become a no-man's-land in the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum, lacking genuine moral instruction activities¹.

78% of Teachers Said: What Most Needs Strengthening Is Moral Education

The on-the-ground response after the cancellation was direct.

On September 28, 2001 (Teacher's Day), the King Car Education Foundation conducted a survey of elementary school teachers at schools with over 300 students in Taipei City and County, collecting 722 valid questionnaires from 24 schools. The results showed: the area teachers believed most needed strengthening was moral education, at approximately 78%. This was followed by character education at about 75%, then life education and life skills education¹.

Seventy-eight percent of teachers believed moral education most needed strengthening, yet the curriculum guidelines had removed the subject of "morality." The teachers' call and the policy direction were completely at odds.

"Respect and Care": A Three-Year Experiment by a Team of Scholars

Faced with this vacuum, some tried to fill it.

Starting in 2001, former Dean of the College of Education at National Chung Cheng University, Professor Huang Kuang-hsiung, led a three-year "Integrated School Moral Education Improvement Project," funded by the Ministry of Education's Advisory Office Humanities and Social Sciences Education Improvement Program. the research team included Professor Ko Hua-wei (Psychology), Professor Chang Chen-tung (Social Welfare), Assistant Professor Hsu Han (Philosophy), and scholars of philosophy of education from the Graduate Institute of Education⁵.

The first year's goal was "re-evaluating and critically inheriting traditional ethical and moral values." The team—comprising an ethicist, a sociologist, a psychologist, and an educator—analyzed the elements and content of morality from their respective disciplinary expertise, meeting every three weeks. After a year of research, reflection, and discussion, they concluded that "respect" and "care" were the moral elements most needed for students' moral cognitive and affective development at the present time¹.

Why "respect" and "care"?

"Respect" comes from Kant's moral philosophy tradition. Kant argued that moral action must arise from duty, and his categorical imperative demands "treating people as ends, never merely as means." Educational philosopher R. S. Peters further identified "respect for others" as a procedural moral principle: respecting others as independent beings with desires, choices, and goals¹.

"Care" comes from the ethics of care developed by Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings. Noddings pointed out that natural caring sentiment in human nature is the driving force of moral practice. She argued that the purpose of education should be to encourage the growth of competent, caring, loving, and lovable people¹.

In the second year, the team, working with teaching and curriculum scholars, developed moral education curricula, pedagogies, materials, and assessment plans infused into each learning area of the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum, based on the two core elements of "respect" and "care." At a "Moral Education Workshop" held in November 2002, 56 workshop participants divided into six groups by learning area. After three days of exchange, discussion, and hands-on design, they developed six sets of "respect" and "care" teaching plans integrated into each learning area¹.

The third year moved into elementary school classrooms for action research on moral education experiments. For example, researchers designed a course on caring for the environment to accompany the fifth-grade Mandarin text "Sweetfish," and used the Mandarin text "The Last Leaf" along with the SARS outbreak at the time to guide students in respecting and caring for nature and life¹.

This research proved one thing: under the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum framework, moral education could be done. But it required an interdisciplinary team of experts, three years of research time, dedicated Ministry of Education project funding, and willing teachers. These conditions are almost impossible to assemble simultaneously in the daily operations of an ordinary school.

Character Education: An Imported American Solution, or Old Wine in New Bottles?

In February 2004, the Ministry of Education convened a "Character and Moral Education Working Group" meeting, attempting to fill the moral education vacuum left by the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum with "character education"⁴.

The roots of character education can be traced back to Aristotle's virtue ethics. The Greek word arete (Latin virtus) originally meant "excellence" and later became associated with the moral dimension of "virtue." Character education in the United States has undergone multiple turns: traditional virtue inculcation before the 1920s, the Hartshorne & May experiments that negated it (1928–1930, roughly 100 experiments on "honesty and deception," concluding in part that "school moral education has no effect on individual character development"), the rise of values clarification in the 1960s, the dominance of Kohlberg's moral cognitive development theory, and the resurgence of the new character education movement in the late 1980s⁴.

Some scholars have questioned Taiwan's direct importation of American character education. First, Taiwan's historical, cultural, and social context differs from that of the United States, making it seemingly inappropriate to directly transplant curricula and programs promoted by various American character education organizations. Second, Taiwan itself has a long tradition of moral education—cultivating sound character through ritual and music has always been the centerpiece of traditional education. Is it necessary to seek lessons from America? Or might this be one of the aftereffects of a decade of education reforms looking to America as the model, resulting in a loss of confidence in one's own cultural traditions⁴?

More pointedly, American critical pedagogy scholar Alfie Kohn has noted: "Today the term character education mostly refers to a collection of admonishments and extrinsic incentives designed to make children work harder and do what they are told." Even when other values such as care and fairness are simultaneously promoted, it still amounts to a preference for indoctrinatory teaching methods⁴.

Kohn also exposed a phenomenon that is laughable in its irony: "If today is Tuesday, then it must be honesty." In American schools implementing the new character education, value after value is assigned its own corresponding day, week, and month. This scene is virtually identical to Taiwan's former practice of a weekly central virtue⁴.

Twenty Years Later: Is Moral Education Still a No-Man's-Land?

The Ministry of Education's response was to launch the "Character Education Promotion Program." According to the seventh Republic of China Education Yearbook, the Ministry established a "Character Education Working Group" based on conclusions from the 2003 "National Education Development Conference," promulgating the first phase of the program on December 16, 2004 (2004–2008), revising and issuing the second phase in 2009 (2009–2013), and focusing the third phase (2014–2018) on the practice and deepening of "core character values" and "codes of conduct"⁶⁷. The yearbook also recorded a key resolution from the 2006 academic year onward: incorporating central virtues and codes of conduct into relevant learning areas and flexible learning periods in schools⁷. A 2009 survey identified the top ten core character values across all school levels, in order: respect for life, filial piety and respect for elders, responsibility and diligence, honesty and trustworthiness, teamwork, self-discipline, proactivity, humility and courtesy, caring and benevolence, and environmental protection⁷.

The 2019 Curriculum Guidelines (the "108 Curriculum") took a different approach. The new guidelines replaced the previous "core competencies" with "core literacy," divided into three dimensions and nine items. Under the "Social Participation" dimension, "Moral Practice and Civic Awareness" is one of the nine literacies⁸. The civic education components of the old "Citizenship and Morality" course—covering democracy, law, rights, and obligations—were transformed at the high school level into "Citizenship and Society," replacing the old virtue-inculcation model with competency-oriented inquiry-based teaching; at the junior high level, they were consolidated into the "Social Studies" learning area³.

Thus, Taiwan's elementary and secondary school timetables present a peculiar distribution: citizenship has its own subject, social studies has its area, literacy has its indicators, but morality has no place of its own. It exists in the "descriptions" of every subject but not on the "timetable" of any subject. "Moral Practice" is part of academic achievement, but there are no dedicated class periods, no dedicated teachers, and no dedicated assessments. In the daily operations of a school, it easily becomes a state of "everyone is responsible, no one is accountable."

Five years after the 108 Curriculum's implementation, frontline criticism has accumulated. A 2022 United Daily News special report identified five major dilemmas the curriculum had fallen into after three years, including "policy spinning its wheels," "doubled pressure," and "excessive burden on the teaching gap"—the gap between curriculum ideals and practice becoming the central controversy⁹. The EdYouth team, composed of current high school students, published the 108 Curriculum Observation Report in 2023, directly stating that while the curriculum's intentions were good, implementation at the high school level needed strengthening, and that students' experience of competency-oriented courses showed a clear gap from the policy's intended goals¹⁰.

These critiques focused primarily on issues such as learning portfolios, examination and admissions systems, and unequal cross-school learning resources. While "Moral Practice and Civic Awareness" was written into the curriculum guidelines, the measurement mechanisms in the teaching field—what counts as meeting the standard, who does the assessment, and how assessment results are used—still lack clear answers. A literacy indicator listed as a core goal but lacking supporting infrastructure may not be so different, in terms of the education students actually receive, from a cancelled subject. That is a question worth asking.

The structural problem has never changed: moral education in Taiwan's curriculum has no independent class periods, no dedicated teachers, and no systematic teaching materials. It is expected to be "naturally infused" into every class, which in practice means no one is specifically responsible for it. The yearbook recorded that during the program's promotion period, there were 103 schools designated as Character Education Deep-Root Schools in the 2010 academic year, increasing to 238 in the 2011 academic year⁷. But against the scale of over 3,000 elementary and junior high schools nationwide, these numbers illustrate the limitations of coverage.

Taiwan does not lack theories of moral education. From Kant's deontology to Noddings' ethics of care, from Kohlberg's cognitive development to Aristotle's virtue ethics, academic discussion has never ceased. Chen Kuang-hui noted in a 2001 study that numerous scholars believed Taiwan's moral education needed strengthening, not neglect or even abolition¹¹. Taiwan also does not lack researchers who have conducted experiments: the three-year action research by Huang Kuang-hsiung, Ko Hua-wei, and others proved that integrating "respect and care" moral education within the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum framework was feasible⁵.

What has been lacking is a policy-level decision: Who teaches it? When is it taught? What materials are used? How is it assessed? And the answers to these questions were originally in the general guidelines of the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum—they were just never concretely implemented as teaching-field support¹².

These questions have hung in the air for nearly a quarter century, from the launch of the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum in 2001 to the present. During this time, an entire generation of Taiwanese students grew up without a dedicated moral education class. They learned Mandarin, math, English, and science; they learned to write learning portfolios and prepare for the college entrance exam. But there was never a single class that systematically discussed with them "what the right thing to do is" and "why one should do the right thing."

Confucius said over two thousand years ago: "Guide them with government and regulate them with punishments, and the people will evade [the law] but have no sense of shame. Guide them with virtue and regulate them with ritual, and they will have a sense of shame and will also be upright." If moral education relies only on law and punishment to maintain a baseline, it produces people who know "what not to do." But what a society truly needs is people who know "what is worth doing"¹.

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