| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 心理學系 === 106 === The thesis is the author’s quest for her personal identity, and a thorough reflection on her past experience as a student with a working-class family background in a high school of alternative education. The author was raised by blue-collar worker parents, did her primary education within the mainstream system, and was enrolled into the first alternative high school in the country during the first wave of educational system reform in Taiwan in the 90’s. The author examines her frustrations in pursuing peer acceptance during her six-year studentship in “Holistic Education School”, and the hardship in earning her livelihood without a mainstream diploma after graduation from the high school. When dealing with her long and hard working hours for a restaurant, what she learned from the alternative high school such as aesthetic appreciation, self-awareness and adventures in Nature served no use at all. The graduation certificate from this school was not a degree to qualify her for higher education either, heightening the level of the difficulties that she was faced with.
The author adopts the action research method to discover new and clarified perspectives through her narrative on this part of her personal history. The author develops the view that due to disagreement with the mainstream educational system, this alternative education institute isolated invented their own educational ideology and environments behind closed doors, attempting to stay away from the limits of mainstream educational pedagogy and values. However, the seemingly Utopia-like school bases its education on castles in the air, overlooking the individual context of each student’s social status and social resources. When the school avoids the question of bridging the gap between the education it provides and the reality of the society and the differences between its student backgrounds, the educational institute is unable to identify and solve the problems caused by such a gap. These problems range from interpersonal conflicts between student groups to the frustrating and disorientating impacts of circumstances and survival difficulties that the students are faced with immediately after graduation, not to mention that some students’ self-identities became detached from their original selves and backgrounds because of the school surrounding. Through her personal eyes as a former student in this alternative high school, the author presents her reflection on the limitations and challenges of the development of alternative education in Taiwan.
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