Why Taiwan Matters: A Short History of a Small Island That Will Impact Our Future

Reflections from Hsinchu, Taiwan

Book of the week: Why Taiwan Matters: A Short History of a Small Island That Will Impact Our Future

If you think Taiwan is just a tiny blip on the map, Why Taiwan Matters will quickly disabuse you of that notion. Kerry Brown (a former diplomat and longtime China scholar who knows the players and the history) pulls off a rare feat: he makes a fraught geopolitical topic genuinely readable—even at bedtime.

Taiwan, as Brown shows, is a political paradox: a democracy with no official independence, a global tech powerhouse with few formal allies, and a cultural gem that’s caught between history, ideology, and high-stakes diplomacy. Oh, and just in case you missed the memo—90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors are made there. (And yes, I was able to visit one of these remarkable facilities.)

Why Taiwan Matters is not a dry policy treatise. Brown has a knack for humanizing the story—whether it’s Taiwanese voters navigating identity, or the economic balancing act that keeps tensions from boiling over (for now). It’s not a thriller, but you’ll still turn pages like it is. 

Brown also—refreshingly—doesn’t pretend there are easy answers. A few of his arguments rubbed me the wrong way, and the more I pushed back in my head, the more I had to admit I was pushing back from feelings, not from anything I could actually defend. That’s the kind of reading I wish more of us did more often—not reading to confirm what we already believe, but reading that makes the mind actually work. Which is pretty much the whole idea behind our “Speak Freely, Think Critically” course.(The link is to a free version of the course.)

Memes, Remixes, and Serious Neuroscience at Taiwan’s NYCU

At National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU), I had the chance to spend time with around 300 students, teachers, and school principals who are doing genuinely exciting things in educational innovation. My host was Professor Kenzen Chen — longtime collaborator, co-author, and one of those rare people who manages to be both rigorous and fun. Together we’ve published work in the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education and The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher on how we adapted Learning How to Learn (學習之道) and Uncommon Sense Teaching for Chinese-speaking learners — not just translating the content, but rethinking how to make the neuroscience land for teachers and MOOC designers across very different cultural contexts. Those redesigned course series have since reached hundreds of thousands of learners across multiple Chinese MOOC platforms. 

The evening class Kenzen taught was a treat. Kenzen had his students creating “remixes” — memes and posters riffing on ideas from LHTL and UST. Some of them had me laughing out loud. Others gave me better ways to explain retrieval practice, focused and diffuse modes, the importance of sleep for memory consolidation, why interleaving beats blocked practice, and much more. (Note to self: never underestimate what a good meme can do for a concept.)

NYCU’s Institute of Education is, in my experience, doing some of the most serious work anywhere in the world on integrating real neuroscience into evidence-based educational research. It’s the kind of program that quietly raises the bar — for what teacher education can look like when it actually takes the science of learning seriously, rather than just gesturing at it.

I also had the privilege of visiting several remarkable experimental schools in Hsinchu: Authentic Education, the Zhubei U-School, Hsinchu Digital Experimental High School, and the IBSH of the Hsinchu Science Park. Each one, in its own way, is asking what school can become when you stop treating the brain as an afterthought.

Which brings me to exciting news: I’m joining a new initiative there as Chief Learning Scientist, working with the Sage Humanities and Education Foundation and NYCU’s HERO Center to help translate what we know about how the brain learns into real classrooms, teacher development, and a new digital learning platform. Taiwan is now well into the second decade of its experimental education movement — and this feels like exactly the right moment to be part of what comes next. More as it unfolds.

That’s all for now. Happy learning!

Barb Oakley

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!