Abstract
After Taiwan’s first regime change in 2000, Yu Kwang-Chung and some of the cultural elites organized a group named "Association to Remedy Chinese Language Education" that leads to a series of controversies over the national language curriculum. Concerned with culture and value in Taiwan’s democratization, this research analyzes cultural legacies from the authoritarian regime, focusing especially on Confucian thoughts in the Four Books, and how it turned to be a conflict between different language education systems after the regime change. The result shows that supporters for traditional values successfully turned over the 2006 guidelines of senior high school textbooks by cooperating with the KMT’s legislators, and makes their cultural legacies return via an institutional way. However, such institutional way actually brings an unequal competition, and constrains nowadays Taiwan’s political development and the contest for cultural values. Several methods have been used in this research, including discourse analysis, textural analysis and in-depth interviewing. In this research, I first review controversies over the national language curriculum and define them into four phases. Furthermore, I examine different curriculum norms and the conditions of curriculum reform in each phase. Last, I focus on the main controversy in 2000 to date, analyzing different language education values between the "Association to Remedy Chinese Language Education" and the committee of 2006 guidelines of textbooks and try to understand them in the context of the controversy. Key words: authoritarian legacy, democratization, political competition, party politics, national language curriculum