What happens when kids grow up in Taiwan’s exam-driven schools
It was nearly nine o’clock on a Thursday night, and I was sitting on a plastic bench outside a cram school in Taipei, waiting to pick up my daughter. Through the glass door I could see her class — about twenty fifth graders, all in brightly colored fleece vests over their school uniforms. The teacher had projected a page of geometry problems on the whiteboard. The children were copying the answers into their notebooks, filling them in like mad-lib worksheets.
The teacher said, “都懂了嗎?” — “All understood?” The class answered, “懂!” in one rehearsed voice. Two rows back, a boy was erasing his work and starting over. His workbook was worn at the edges. He had not spoken all night.
I don’t bring this up to criticize the teacher. She was doing what the system rewards. Every parent in that waiting area had the same hope: that their child would leave with higher test scores, clearer next steps, a safe future. And to be fair, the system does deliver on that. Taiwan’s students rank near the top of global math and science assessments. It works, if you measure by what shows up on report cards.
But my daughter was quiet on the scooter ride home. Not the nice kind of quiet. The kind where you can feel a child’s brain has been running on a conveyor belt at high speed. When I asked her what she learned, she said, “The teacher said we’d cover this again before the exam, so we don’t need to remember it now.”
She wasn’t being lazy. She was being truthful. The entire system had taught her that what matters is the correct answer at the right moment. Not understanding. Not curiosity. Just performance on cue.
I’ve been thinking about this over the past few years, watching her and her friends move through elementary school. There’s a peculiar kind of sterility to Taiwan’s education. It’s not just about exams — every country has exams. It’s the careful removal of anything that might slow down the processing line. Creative writing is heavily scaffolded, with templates that reward following the format. Science classes teach formulas and definitions, with little time for messing around with actual experiments. Even PE classes, in many schools, are run by the clock, with students lined up to do lunges to nowhere.
A neighbor of mine, whose son is now in his second year of university, told me something that has stuck. Her son scored well on the entrance exam and got into a decent program. But when he got there, he told her he didn’t actually know what he was interested in. He’d spent six years learning how to pass exams, and no one — not his teachers, not his parents, not the many tutors who coached him — had ever asked him what he liked. “He wasn’t depressed,” she said. “He was just empty, like a tape that had been erased.”
I don’t think this is unique to Taiwan. But it’s concentrated here, the way humidity is concentrated on a subtropical island. You see it in the sheer scale of the cram school industry, the processing plants where students from elementary school through high school spend their evenings and weekends. You see it in the way parents talk about 補習 as an inevitability, not a choice. You see it in the way my daughter, who loves drawing, now feels guilty when she picks up a sketchbook during homework time, as if making something for pleasure were stealing time from something more real.
So what do we do? I’m not writing this from a place of having solved it. Most days, I’m just trying to find the seams in the system and poke at them gently.
One thing that has helped at home is changing the questions. “What did you learn today?” produces an empty summary or a shrug. Instead, I ask, “What confused you today?” That takes some prompting, because confusion is treated as something to be hidden. I had to tell my own daughter, “If nothing confused you, it probably means you were copying, not thinking.” After a few weeks, she started volunteering real answers: “I don’t get why the area formula works, I just know it.” That gave us something we could actually talk about.
I also try to protect unstructured time, which is harder than it sounds. The school schedule, the homework load, and the sheer social pressure of friends going to afternoon classes all push against it. We’ve blocked out weekend afternoons as a no-homework zone. It’s not always possible, but even when we have to breach it, just knowing the boundary exists helps my daughter think of herself as someone who is, at least partly, outside the processing line.
And I’ve started being a worse parent in one particular way: I let her see me be wrong. Taiwan’s schooling drilled not only the children but an entire generation of parents into valuing certainty. Admitting you don’t know something feels like failing. But when I sat with her at the kitchen table last week and fumbled through a fractions problem, she got to see that adults also struggle. She corrected my method, almost with surprise. “You got it wrong first,” she said. “Yeah,” I said. “And then I found the right way by trying.”
That moment isn’t going to fix everything. She’ll still face at least another decade of exam culture, and I’m not going to withdraw her from school to unschool her on a farm. But I’ve come to believe that the most important thing isn’t fighting the system head-on. It’s keeping a small, alive corner of curiosity and tolerance for uncertainty going at home.
The other day, I watched her write a story for her Chinese class. She tapped her pen for a long time, staring at the ceiling. “I don’t know what the ending should be,” she said. She didn’t pick the template ending — the one that wraps up neatly with a lesson. She chose something slightly strange instead, with an ending that doesn’t tie up all the loose threads.
It probably won’t get a good grade. She might be asked to rewrite it. But she chose it anyway, and that felt like a small, personal victory. Not a revolution. Just a crack in the conveyor belt — maybe enough for one child to breathe.
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