The nation’s education policies call for global communication and digital judgment, yet high-stakes exams continue to reward exactly the kinds of rote skills most vulnerable to automation
By Nigel P. Daly / Contributing reporter
Taiwan’s English education system is being pulled apart by three opposing forces. Bilingual Nation 2030 pulls students toward English and global communication. Artificial Intelligence (AI) readiness pulls them toward digital judgment, verification and AI-mediated work. But Taiwan’s old exam culture pulls them back toward memorization, grammar drills, timed reading and correct answers. If the education system keeps using old exams to define success, it risks producing graduates who are neither genuinely bilingual nor genuinely AI-ready, but trained for tasks machines can already perform.The first force is Bilingual Nation 2030. Launched in 2018, the policy aimed to “help Taiwan’s workforce connect with the world” and “attract international enterprises to Taiwan.” [1] But ChatGPT changed the terms of the debate. Sebastian Liao (廖咸浩), Dean of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences at National Taiwan University, argues that AI translation has made the instrumental case for mass English learning “technologically obsolete.” His deeper warning is about cognitive cost: students forced to learn complex subjects through a language they have not mastered may “waste their youth, and even become semiliterate.”
