Nine Years of Compulsory Education

On June 27, 1967, at a memorial assembly in the Presidential Office, Chiang Kai-shek directed that compulsory education be extended from six years to nine. The instruction moved through the system with unusual speed: legislation was completed before the end of the year, the Statute for the Implementation of Nine-Year National Education was promulgated in January 1968, and the new system took effect at the start of the autumn term that same year. From announcement to operation took less than fifteen months.

At the heart of the reform was the abolition of the junior high school entrance examination. Until then, primary school graduates had to pass a fiercely competitive exam to continue, with pass rates hovering around fifty percent — which is to say that for nearly half of all children, education ended at the age of twelve. The new system converted junior middle schools into "national middle schools" and assigned every primary graduate a place without examination. The gate that had stood at age twelve was simply removed.

The administrative cost was staggering. Several hundred new middle schools had to be founded within a single year, thousands of classrooms built, and tens of thousands of teachers hired. The pace was such that many buildings were still unfinished shells when term began, and teaching posts were filled in bulk through short training courses and substitute appointments. The financing was improvised to match: entertainment taxes were raised, land tax surcharges increased, a dedicated education levy introduced, and the formula for distributing local education funds rewritten. It was a reform pushed through under simultaneous institutional and fiscal strain.

The effects, however, ran deep. Middle school enrollment rose from roughly half to over ninety percent within a decade, literacy climbed sharply, and the cohort that completed nine years of basic schooling entered the labor market precisely during the 1970s — the generation on the export processing zone assembly lines who could read a work instruction and learn a new machine. Discussions of Taiwan's economic takeoff return endlessly to institutions, American aid, and exchange rate policy; the broadening of education is often passed over, though it may be the least substitutable factor of them all.

The shadows are equally clear. Examination pressure did not disappear; it moved from age twelve to age fifteen, with the senior high entrance examination becoming the new bottleneck. Ability-based streaming was institutionalized within middle schools, and the so-called "cattle-herding classes" turned the decision of which children to give up on into an administrative procedure. Expanded compulsory schooling was also an expanded ideological channel: the curriculum intensified Chinese history and geography, the Three Principles of the People, and military training, portraits of the head of state hung in every classroom, and speaking a mother tongue still drew a penalty. Nine-year education kept more children in school, and it kept more children inside the party-state's story of itself.

This makes it one of the hardest policies of the authoritarian era to summarize in a single sentence. The same regime, in the same years, was both the perpetrator of the White Terror and the architect of universal basic education; and the schooling it built with its own hands eventually produced the generation that took to the streets in the 1980s to demand that it hand over power. Nine-year compulsory education is among the very few authoritarian-era policies that no one proposed reversing after democratization. History rarely sorts credit and blame into columns this cleanly — which is exactly why this case deserves to be remembered whole.