1. Introduction
Educational leadership is a central theme in educational management. The quality of leadership is perceived importance in developing successful education systems and student outcomes (Bush, 2007; Leithwood, 2007) . There are various theories of educational leadership, but still a few questions about it. Since “much of the educational leadership literature is not about actual leadership practices” (Leithwood, 2007) , how does the leadership produce the favourable outcomes? And is the educational leadership effective in different educational culture context, like western and eastern culture?
The Taiwanese educational system has a distinct educational structure and historical educational belief, which combines both Confucius educational philosophies and modern western educational theories. It has made tremendous achievement in the past decades, which is attractive to research and meaningful to further develop this compound system. Through its comparison with the Chinese and the western educational leadership, a series of distinctive educational leadership charisma can be found in the Taiwanese educational system. It provides an example to see how the leadership practice in the different cultural background. The paper reviewed Taiwanese educational leadership from the cultural perspective, through the participative observation of Taiwan education system and personal interview of Taiwanese principals，teachers, presidents, faculty members, and students.
2. An overview of Taiwanese Educational System
2.1. Leadership Structures of Taiwanese Education System
Taiwan’s educational system is an important part of eastern educational culture. Its origins, philosophies, connotation, and form of expression represent the traditional eastern Confucian education theory. Based on Taiwanese educational system, Taiwanese educational leadership style follows Confucian thinking modes and behavior standards. Later on, western leadership styles have been brought into Taiwan educational system and been widely accepted in a short time. As a result, educational leadership in Taiwan is complex and diverse, which has combined eastern leadership backgrounds and western leadership theories.
Influenced by this leadership style and the traditional Chinese culture, Taiwanese leadership structure presents obvious characteristics of the Confucius and western leadership system. The Confucius leadership system, driven greatly by hierarchical authority, has strong tendencies toward collectivism and large power distance during its leading process (Shouse & Lin, 2010) . These leadership methods originate from traditional Confucianism and feudalism, which emphasize the distance between different social statuses. Fox example, leaders have higher status than subordinates; people who work by minds have higher social status than people who work by hands; and elder people have higher social status than younger people (Shouse & Lin, 2010) . Furthermore, in a family, its hierarchical authority can be shown from the power of father and absolute obedience from the other family members. Meanwhile, in an education organization, its hierarchical authority can be found through the dignity and governance of principals and presidents, and a pyramidal authority structure from top to down.
Consequently, absolute obedience and restricted authority, instead of the development of their own leadership skills, are deep-rooted in school teachers’ brains. In the minds of most of the school faculty members and teachers in Taiwan, there is only one leader in their school system, who is their principal (Shouse & Lin, 2010) . Besides, leadership methods in Taiwan and other eastern countries focus on “mein-zi”, which is a kind of personal pride. In traditional eastern culture, this pride and special dignity is more important than people’ wealthy, even people’s lives. As a result, both leaders and subordinates will carefully provide “mein-zi” to others to maintain their relationships and the whole leadership structures. For instance, college presidents and school principals usually use symbolic ceremonies and conferences to communicate with teachers. They also like to use fancy banquets to welcome guests, which not only shows their hospitalities, but also presents their organizations’ powerful influence, their “mein-zi”, and their high social status. Furthermore, this large power distance makes them educational leaders clearly different leadership charismas. It can be found in different Taiwanese presidents’ various leadership styles. Subsequently, these diverse charismas can produce unique organizational environments, because normally these leaders like to choose their favorite subordinates (Shouse & Lin, 2010) .
The Confucius leadership structure has its own strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, Taiwan, as well as other countries in East Asia, has a large population and limited resources. This requires various organizations to be more efficient and productive. The system of hierarchical authority reduces redundant discussions and ensures immediate reactions to emergencies and effective decision-making to changes. Furthermore, subordinates will implement organizational decisions or policies as an order, and finish their jobs as a task. Therefore, problems can be solved easily in this quick and effectual system. Also, because of the respect and compliance from subordinates to leaders, no matter how large it is, every institution turns out to have fewer personal conflicts and need lower requirements for organizational chemistry. Last, but not least, a higher-level position for organizational members means they can gain more power and respects. As a result, the Taiwanese organizational culture has more positive competitions due to everyone’s strong desire to a higher-level position. These competitions can keep pushing the whole organization, even the whole society, to a higher stage.
On the other hand, this centralized leadership structure easily causes some kinds of problems, compared to the western democratic leadership system. Leaders can make their own decisions for the organization, which simply depends on their capabilities and temporary judgment. A great leader can make great decisions and enormous contributions to an organization. However, nobody is perfect to makes all right judgments. One person’s knowledge and thinking also cannot compare to several persons’ wisdom. Due to less advices and helps, an organization may be destroyed by an erroneous decision and some incorrect information. In addition, enormous competitions will cause more pressures in the organizational culture, which may lead to a higher transfer rate and even suicide rate. Moreover, the majority of the members in an organization has to follow the decision rather than thinking by themselves, which makes it difficult to exert the potentials of the whole organization.
2.2. Reforms in Taiwanese Educational Leadership
As a result, Taiwanese schools and universities have made a variety of reforms to their educational leadership system. Principals and presidents begin to share powers and let more subordinates to participate into their educational leadership and management. In the public school system, during the reforms, principals have to use less power to stand more responsibilities than they did before. Like in western countries, Taiwanese principals cannot fire a teacher or reduce a teacher’s salary any more. They also have to obey the strict restrictions from government and school systems. In the private school system, principals have more power than public school principals. They also have more freedoms to implement educational reforms and western educational theories. However, the educational reform makes they have more pressures from schools’ funds, board of trusts, and social environment. They have to concentrate on the enhancement of schools’ reputation and the development of relationships with industries and government. Their multiple responsibilities include the principals of schools, the presidents of companies, and the politician in local communities. All of these changes force both Taiwanese public and private educational institutions to search for more comprehensive and outstanding leaders with significant responsibilities and exceptional leadership skills. Taiwanese modern leaders and educators not only need to have more wide-ranging skills to fulfill their multiple responsibilities, but also apply western leadership philosophies into this eastern educational environment, which leads them rely more on a senior leadership team, rather than an individual heroic leader.
However, this educational reform still has a long way to strive for. In some areas in Taiwan, especially some remote districts, educational leaders still feel comfortable with their centralized leadership structures. They reject share their power and consider it as a loss of their authorities and dignities. What is worse, only education leaders could realize the necessities of sharing authorities. The majority of other organizational members do not have any concepts of participating into leading activities. For instance, some important faculty members in Taiwan Universities even do not know the further development plans and current issues of the institution. It was also common that plenty of Taiwanese faculty and teachers have no idea of their organizational missions, visions, and short-term developing goals. In their minds, rather than considering those “principals’ jobs”, they just need to focus on their own responsibilities.
To summarize, facing the modern challenging chaos, the educational leadership structure in Taiwan has become more flexible and comprehensive. They are developing themselves from the eastern hierarchical power to the western shared authority. They are more capable in dealing with stakeholders, to accumulate capital, and to access superior human resources. Besides that, those leaders have been more inclined to rely on their beliefs, visions, missions, trust, and love in this complex situation to be ahead of the competition. For their institutions, they try their best to find the right direction and make the right decisions at the right time. However, for Taiwanese educational institutions, how to create more successful leaders and great leadership teams complying with local environment and development of times is an everlasting problem that is worthy for all the educators to research.
3. Current Issues and Further Improvements
With the development of technology and economics in the new century, the current complex chaos has also brought unprecedented tremendous pressures to Taiwanese educational institutions. It has also given rise to a series of educational issues, from academic to finance and from teachers to students. Some of the problems mentioned are high-stakes testing, competitive teaching environment, technological shock, decreasing social ethics, diminishing government educational expenditure, declining social esteem and increasing public expectations, contradictions brought by the expansion of the education scale, troubled educational reforms, and the dwindling competitiveness of global educational area. Simultaneously, western educational culture continually challenges Taiwan’s tradition educational methods. It increases the difficulty to balance the conflicts between alien educational belief and domestic educational philosophy.
3.1. High-Stake Examination Systems
After the development of thousands of years, education in East Asia has formed a mature and disciplined philosophy. Under this philosophy, the core of the traditional Taiwanese school systems is still its high-stake examination systems. This systematic examination system leads Taiwanese students make a variety of academic achievements in the International Olympiad competition, adults’ literacy rates, and so on. However, it also causes diverse educational issues and related discussion, which can be shown in-school education, after-school activities, and parenting education.
3.1.1. Issues in in-School Education
During the school period, like a leader’s role in eastern leadership structure, teachers usually play a dominating role and guide students to learn knowledge which mainly comes from text books (Su, 2007) . The absolute authority from teachers makes them as parents for students in managing their study and lives. The exam-centered and textbooks-centered teaching methods lead students have better skills at coping exams instead of applying knowledge. There is a competition among Taiwanese schools in their students’ performance in examinations and graduate rates. Then, schools further transfer these competitions into their classes. Finally, these competitions were left to the students. Students have to face heavy curriculums and numerous exams. The school system has already become a cram school system. Students’ studying pressures even have become the symbol of eastern educational system.
Facing this problem, Taiwanese government has carried out a number of educational reforms. It tries to educate students by improving their learning skills and increasing their employment rates after graduation. Also, the school system began to reduce the emphasis on high-stakes testing and designed more transformational curriculums, instructive practices, and multiple after-school activities for students. Students’ psychological well-being and comprehensive development have been more focused on. In this situation, the score of these high-stake tests is not the only standard and channel to get to college. Each public high school has the authority to recommend several outstanding students with high grades in regular exams to go to the college directly without entrance exams. Additionally, a number of students are encouraged to study abroad to lessen exam pressures and risks.
To some extent, this educational reform alleviates the testing pressures for high school students. Nevertheless, the high-stakes testing is still the main channel for most of students to go to colleges. It is because Taiwan is a small island with limited resources and a large number of people. Therefore, it can only rely on education to improve people’s intelligence, personal capability, and professional skills. Then, it can use these human resources to win a position in the global competition. This whole educational system makes Taiwan to be a successful developed country in the world, but aggravates the competition among Taiwanese people. As a result, the high-stakes testing becomes a reasonable way to separate students into different universities with different recourses. Besides that, traditional Confucius philosophies promote this completion, which leads this testing system to be inveteracy. All of these are also the main blocks that educational reforms have to face. In the future, the Taiwanese educational system needs to find out a more comprehensive way to encourage and educate students. For example, it can use multiple standards to judge students, instead of one high-stakes test or a student’s academic achievement. Universities can also search more a more flexible way to recruit students and provide more opportunities to the students with different needs.
3.1.2. Issues in after-School Activities
After-school activities in Taiwan are more school-related than in western countries, which is another reason that Taiwanese students have a better academic performance than most of the students from western countries. A well-known study from the U.S., “Two Million Minutes”, indicated that Chinese and Indian high school students spend much more time studying than Americans in their precious two million minutes in high school (“Two Million Minutes”, 2012) . In fact, even though many of the Asian students do not have positive attitude towards some subjects, they can still study hard and perform well on them. For example, some researches from Hong Kong show that both fourth-grade boys’ and girls’ Chinese and English reading performances are not significantly related to their reading attitudes due to their excellent learning environment (Loh & Tse, 2009) .
Due to the reason that the Taiwan educational system is more focused on exams and textbooks, both teachers and students are willing to utilize more time afterschool to improve themselves in getting a higher academic accomplishment. Like students in other Asian countries, students in Taiwan will spend most of their time doing homework, and attending academics improving programs and private cram schools. Those ways are believed to be able to improve students’ educational achievements, but some will have negative effects on students’ psychological well-beings. Therefore, Taiwanese students have less free time and worse physical quality than American students. To deal with this problem, diverse after-school activities should be applied in Taiwanese schools, which can include sports’ contest and community services. Cram schools can be spread to teach other interests, like music, sports, chess, painting, and so on. In summary, a more comprehensive after-school curriculum should be provided to Taiwanese students.
3.1.3. Issues in Parenting Education
In traditional Asian families, children’s education is the major responsibility for the whole family. Therefore, parenting plays a significant role in eastern educational system. One of the parents in a family, normally the mother, will even quit her jobs staying at home to teach her children. Children’s studying is usually the only hopes for the family to elevate their social status. Then, their academic achievements will be the pride of the whole family.
Traditional patriarchal families with undoubted rights in educating students are still common. Most of them supervise their children’s life and studies, and make important decisions for them. However, modern researches indicate that this authoritarian parenting will make a negative impact on students’ educational achievement (Pong, Johnston, & Chen, 2010) . Their pressures and expectations will make students lose some family happiness and cause family conflicts. Also, their decisions may influence students’ independent and living capability. To deal with this big issue, the Taiwanese educational system needs to have more guides and advices to help parents educating their children, especially for the young parents who are more open to the modern parenting education. The new educational methods should be considered to balance children’s freedom and restriction, and use the influence from parents to make their children live in a healthier environment. These methods also need to focus on alleviating students’ pressures using family factors, and promoting students to do more comprehensive activities rather than studying at home or cram schools. Besides parents, grandparents, as the persons with the most prestige and the highest status in Asian family, also can be encouraged to make an immense contribution in children’s education. Though Taiwanese family is now getting smaller, there are still more elder people living with the children in Taiwan than in the western countries. What is more, the students who live with grandparents can have better academic performance than the students who do not live with them (Pong & Chen, 2010) . This phenomenon happens because grandparents normally have more free time to actively participate into children education. They are able to reconcile the contradiction between parents and children. Also, they can use their dignity, experience, and wisdom guiding their grandchildren into a positive study attitude and life objectives. Their participation can help Taiwanese students have a more outstanding parenting education.
3.2. Competitive Teaching Environment
As an area taking education as a developmental foundation, Taiwan has paid a great attention to the construction of education. To the largest extend, it tries to provide an excellent teaching environment and appropriate educational strategies for educators in all the educational institutions. However, in the new competitive and complex century, there are still a variety of problems in its current teaching situation.
3.2.1. Growing Gaps between Public and Private Universities
First of all, a perceptional gap exists between public and private faculty members in colleges. A faculty from public universities can obtain more teaching support and teaching efficacy than a faculty from private ones. Normally, teachers in public universities receive more peer support, teaching resources, and government funding support, all of which can enhance an organization’s teaching effectiveness in daily educating. This situation creates a larger academic gap between those two types of universities in Taiwan (Chang, McKeachie, & Lin, 2010) . In order to solve this issue, more concerns and supports should be provided to private universities. Also, more regulations should be made to supervise all kinds of private educational institutions in Taiwan to make them more standardized. In addition, public universities and private universities can strengthen their cooperation, learn advantages from each other, and develop the Taiwanese higher education system together.
3.2.2. Increasing Teaching Pressures
Secondly, though it used to be considered to be a high paying and respectful occupation, recently, Taiwanese school teachers have experienced a decrease in job satisfaction because of bad working conditions and rising professional competition (Cheng & Ren, 2010) . Some scholars pointed out that those school teachers’ job pressures mainly come from exacerbating teacher-surplus, the heavier job loads, and lacking coping strategies; especially the young teachers with less teaching experience (Chih-Lun, 2011) . More specifically, in order to become a teacher, Taiwanese people have to experience a lot of learning, training, and exams. However, after all of these, they still cannot find an appropriate job. Even they can get employed; they still have to face a variety of competitions and heavy tasks as a teacher in Taiwanese schools.
In address this issue, more recourse classrooms need to be provided to deal with the explosion of enrolling students and the increasing class sizes in Taiwan. In addition, the professional level and the comprehensive qualification of teacher need to be developed to escalate the dwindling teachers’ satisfaction (Cheng & Ren, 2010) . Moreover, the training and counseling of coping strategies are going to be provided to young elementary teachers.
3.2.3. The Debate of Corporal Punishment
As mentioned above, in the daily process of teaching, all the students in Taiwan have to follow the knowledge from the textbooks and teachers. In order to execute this traditional disciplined teaching method, corporal punishment has existed for a long time in their educational system. In 2006, this tough punishment was banned by Taiwanese legislatives and some more humanistic ways for student management have been implemented. However, a large number of educators still support that form of discipline and believe that the declining students’ ethics, motivation, and quality are attributed to the ban of the effective method (Chiang, 2011) . Some schools still use this kind of punishment method to educate students; even though most of teachers and school leaders in Taiwan do not admit they use that today. From the attitude of the students and students’ reactions, students are afraid of the teachers and some of the teachers can yell at students if they do not perform well. It shows that the essence of this punishment system is still practiced in the Taiwanese educational environment, but maybe in another expression. In order to solve this issue, the application of more innovative educational disciplinary forms, instead of corporal punishment, should be launched and spread in Taiwanese schools. This new form need2 to be more scientific, reasonable, and adaptable in accordance with the development of the era. It also should be more conservative and positive, and widely recognized by modern educational theories and international academia. However, it is not an easy task, which needs more time and practices in order to work and be extensively accepted in Taiwan.
3.2.4. Restrictions to Christian Education
Christian education has developed very fast in Taiwan, with more churches, more Christians, and more Christian seminaries. However, the Taiwanese government has a strict regulation on its formal Christian education. It allows only one Christian seminary, Taiwan Baptist Theological Seminary. Even in this seminary, the Taiwanese government not only has a limitation on its recruitment every year and its total students, but also has a regulation on its daily activities and operations. Taiwanese people also have diverse negative reactions to this religion. According to the faculty members in Taiwan Baptist Theological Seminary, most of Taiwanese do not respond to their ministry and preaching. They have their own belief and spiritual world. There is an extremely difficult situation in Taiwan to enlarge Christian schooling and develop ministry activities, which also leaved a large room for Taiwan to develop its Christian education.
3.2.5. Cultural Conflicts in Global Educational Communication
Fourthly, there are various cultural conflicts between western educational studies and Taiwanese educational operations. Currently, most of the principals in Taiwan admitted that the main structure of Taiwanese educational system was learned from the west, and western educational theories have been widely accepted by Taiwanese academia. However, during educational implementation, a number of theories and applications are not appropriate in Taiwan. For instance, some of the western approaches, like child-centeredness and the guideline of Developmentally Appropriate Practice, are seen as a general standard in global early childhood pedagogical practices. Conversely, in Taiwanese preschool, the early educational theory of child-centeredness that learned from western concept has been questioned for it is impractical and ambiguous. A number of teachers, especially experienced teachers, struggle with those theories and still prefer their traditional methods. They believe the definition of children’s freedom and norms are various according to different cultures and environments (Lee & Tseng, 2008) . In summary, in all kinds of practical educational fields, it is proper to adjust western theories and measures to the local cultural conditions, rather than copying western experience in educating Taiwanese students.
4. Reflections and Discussions
A It is well known that both western and eastern educational systems have their own advantages and disadvantages, and both of the systems have plenty of things to learn from each other. However, in Taiwan, it is not easy to implement western educational theories and leadership styles in eastern educational environment. Cultural conflicts and local realistic problems are always inevitable. There are many difficulties to transform and reform according to other alien theories, however, the problems and conflicts are salient.
When think about mainland China’s development of its higher educational system and its educational reforms, Taiwanese educational reforms and its implemental problems are a wonderful example for Chinese educational systems’ further development. Compared to schools and universities in mainland China, Taiwanese educational institutions are more modernized and democratized, which can be also seen in their more open and advanced school environment. Students do not have to wear the same uniforms, and they are more encouraged to develop their personal interests according to their characteristics. They also have more freedom to do what they like to do and have more facilitators to help them study. For instance, they have a more advanced international exchange system and it is easier for Taiwanese students to go abroad to study. Also, they have a wonderful policy for foreign students, providing them with a large number of scholarships and numerous internship opportunities. Furthermore, higher percentages of government funds are raised and newer technologies are being used, which makes all of the college students do not need to worry about their tuitions. From 2006, over 20% of the government expenditures were used in education each year, and half of these expenditures went to higher education, which helps all of the universities and vocational colleges go smoothly through the global economic recession (National Statistics, 2022) . All of these cause fewer financial pressures for both students and society. In addition, almost every university has various cooperation with some companies which can help these universities with extra financial supports.
The Taiwanese educational systems also more focus on the development of students’ professional skills. For example, in Taiwan, many college students face a dilemma: whether to choose their favorite major or choose a major with easy job hunting and better financial returns. The Taiwanese educational system applies plenty of vocational educational schools to deal with this problem. According to Ministry of Education in Taiwan, 75% of high school students will go to vocational colleges to study, which also offers enough skillful workers to the society. Most of these vocational colleges provide wonderful experiential and simulated environmental learning, which can help Taiwanese students obtain more professional skills and adjust to their employment more easily. In order to help more students to pursue their dreams and find a job easier, Taiwanese universities also provide various job-hunting assistance. These assistance help students in different majors to receive more information about related departments and even have pre-work internships in those organizations. In addition, for some talented students in low sought after majors, like entomology, botany, and geology, the Taiwanese government offers special funds to support their researches and development. In one sentence, Taiwanese schools are more socialized and humanistic.
Moreover, the relationships between mainland China and Taiwan influences the exchanges in all area, including educational area. As well known, mainland China is an unavoidable but sensitive topic for Taiwan as an important partner and competitor. Nevertheless, as the saying goes, “education is boundless”; education can turn out to be a great breakthrough to improve the connections between two sides. Mainland China and Taiwan share the same language, similar traditional cultures and thinking modes, and similar educational philosophies and systems. Even though they have totally different developing ways and ideologies due to the historic reasons, cooperation instead of contest will be a mainstream between them in this new era. It will be an obvious reciprocal relationship for both of the parts communicating in educational area. mainland China has more populations and territories, which can provide greater markets, experiments, and funds into education. At the same time, Taiwan has more successful experiences in learning western educational methods. Especially its educational modernization and democratization have achieved an extremely high level.
In 2011, both of the two sides not only open direct flights and cancel the travel bans, but also begin to start educational recognition and communication. Taiwan’s legislature has passed an act recognizing the 41 universities’ degrees from mainland China. In return, Chinese universities accept 164 Taiwanese universities’ degrees (Xinhua, 2011) . In the fall of 2011, this act attracted 2,000 mainland students coming to the universities in Taiwan to study, which is the first time in their educational history in more than 60 years (Hennock, 2011) . The number of the mainland students continually increased in the following years. In this situation, Taiwanese schools pay greater attention to students from mainland China, which is seen as a tremendous opportunity for the development of the Taiwanese educational organizations, but at the same time, for the sake of security, the management and recruitment to these students are very strict. Also, mainland students are able to enjoy a different identity and environment compared to international students from other countries, due to the same origins, language and culture. Consequently, mainland students and Taiwanese students can study together and communicate more easily.
However, there are still a number of ideological difficulties and political obstacles blocking their educational exchanges, and their communication still stays in higher educational area. For example, same as Chinese history textbooks, the two series of textbooks in Taiwanese educational history certified the theory that the first generation of Taiwanese residents came from mainland China. They also mentioned the colonial aggression from Holland and Japan and the reunion with mainland China after the World War II. However, both the textbooks and school teachers avoid the sensitive diction as a united China and political unity (Su, 2007) . The cultural uniform and the ideological difference will definitely make difficulties for the further educational cooperation. The educational communication model between mainland China and Hong Kong is an excellent example, but Taiwan will still maintain different rules.
Recently, with the deterioration of cross-straits relations, the academic exchanges have decreased. Therefore, both of the sides should seek commonpoints while reserving differences to develop traditional eastern Confucian educational theory collectively.
5. Conclusion
Based on traditional and conservative Confucius educational philosophies, the Taiwanese educational system absorbs a series of advanced modern western educational theories. On the one hand, it carries on its great educational traditions and broadens them. Both the teachers and students have already made various outstanding academic achievement compared to the global counterparts. On the other hand, Taiwanese education is also profoundly influenced by economic recession, technology revolution, and cultural shocks in this competitive teaching environment, and faces different kinds of problems. This series of educational issues have made negative impacts on its further educational development. Consequently, it has experienced a large scale of educational reforms and abandoned several outdated applications. In the area of both theory and practice, it tried to balance the advantages between the eastern and western educational culture. Besides, it has strengthened its educational communication with mainland China, which creates a win-win environment for the educational development for both sides. The deepening and enlargement of the communication should be mutual beneficial. However, its transformation exerts its potential and develops it to be more excellent in educational freedom, democratization, and modernization, which makes it strive for a brighter and greater future. Furthermore, Taiwanese educational leadership deserves more in-depth studies, Comparative studies are desirable. For example, comparing the educational leadership of Hong Kong or Macao with Taiwan may provide more theoretical and practical enlightenment.