TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Parents should not treat home electronics products as monsters, because that attitude is going to prevent Taiwan from producing the next generation of creatives and innovators, National Taiwan University (NTU) Professor Benson Yeh (葉丙成) said Saturday (Nov. 5).
At a seminar, the electrical engineering specialist described parents as the biggest potential obstacles to the development of new electronics talent in Taiwan. He said the students who most often dropped out at NTU were those who had not been allowed to use computers, smartphones or tablets before they started their university studies, the Liberty Times reported.
Parents needed to abandon the attitude that phones amounted to games, and had to see them as instruments instead, Yeh said. He insisted that if Taiwanese wanted to work at the next generation of innovative enterprises in Taiwan, they needed to acquire the capabilities of working in a digital society and of cooperating across borders.
The COVID-19 pandemic showed that many teachers, students, and parents did not have the required digital literacy to conduct virtual classes, according to Yeh, who created a Facebook group where 140,000 teachers help each other become familiar with the necessary technology.