High Schoolers Can Shape National Education Policy: The EdYouth Story

Writing these lines, it's January 2025. The winter sun outside is a little blinding. I can't help thinking back to who I was three years ago: just a high school senior, anxious about which college to pick and what direction life would take. Honestly, I never imagined back then that I'd one day be woken by media calls as an "association chair," rushing between meetings and advocacy events on education reform.

Why I stepped away from textbooks into advocacy

I grew up in Caotun, Nantou, good mountains, good water, famously dull. Compared to a city like Taipei, education resources and college-entry information were in short supply. In my first year of high school, I heard the government was rolling out the 2019 Curriculum Guidelines reform, a sweeping overhaul I knew that much of, though I had no sense of the turbulence coming. By junior and senior year, my classmates and I woke up to the chaos we were already in: poor transitions between old and new course requirements, unclear elective planning, no standardized criteria for assessing learning portfolios.

At first, like most of my peers, I had no choice but to accept it passively. But something felt off. The entire system claimed to put "students at the center," but where were the students' voices? Those questions led me to join curriculum discussions inside and outside school, and eventually to serve as a "youth representative," walking into government meeting rooms. What I found there unsettled me. The proposals we worked hard on were almost universally answered with "noted" or "will be studied further." A few minutes at the microphone, a group photo, and the meeting ended. Those feelings stayed with me, and they were probably the reason I later wanted to build something that could sustain influence beyond any one meeting.

Starting from a report

In March 2022, still a high school senior, I started thinking with a few partners: could we take this frustration, observe it rationally, and turn it into a report: a systematic account of the anxieties and difficulties students were facing under the 2019 Curriculum Guidelines? We temporarily named the project "First-Generation Guinea Pigs of the 2019 Curriculum Guidelines," hoping that student action could become a small but consequential force in Taiwan's education reform conversation.

During the research phase, we collected student feedback through online surveys and in-person campus investigations, covering course difficulty, learning portfolio friction, and the rural-urban resource gap. We ran intensive focus groups over winter break: some students reported that "self-directed learning" periods were just study halls with no guidance; others said rural schools simply didn't have enough qualified teachers to run elective courses. When the report was released, it sparked a nationwide discussion, and the following year FlipEdu ran a profile on this group of students who were monitoring curriculum reform without getting credit for it.

Why build an organization, not just post on social media

From the start, I made a deliberate choice: build an organization, not just a voice. The reasoning was clear: a personal observation is an anecdote; an organizational survey is evidence. If I wanted education officials and legislators to take the data seriously, it had to come from a unit with institutional standing, not just a frustrated student online.

The team grew from three or four people to members spanning different counties and school types. Some were strong writers, some were designers, and some loved tuning into the Legislative Yuan's IVOD livestream to collect firsthand information. That diversity showed me how much varied talent students carry, and how often it goes unseen for lack of a suitable platform to express it.

In April 2023 we officially renamed to EdYouth. The Chinese "一滴優" is a near-homophone of "Education for Youth," and carries the image of water wearing through stone. That December, EdYouth was formally registered under the Ministry of the Interior as EdYouth Taiwan.

Four annual reports, policy white papers, and three legislative arrows

The annual "2019 Curriculum Guidelines Observation Report," spanning four years, was EdYouth's flagship output. We knew every edition had its limitations, but we held ourselves to continuous improvement year over year, and we believed that every interview, every survey response, was a real student's real voice.

These reports captured a substantial share of what was actually happening in classrooms, and received wide coverage, including the confusion surrounding the learning-portfolio rollout, the risk of bilingual policy producing M-shaped learning gaps, and over half of self-directed learning students unable to identify a topic. The reports were also translated into English, included in Taiwan's CRC (Convention on the Rights of the Child) international review, and cited in 20+ academic papers and by 19+ cross-party legislators in questioning and Legislative Yuan public hearings.

Over three years, EdYouth held more than 20 press conferences, including policy white papers on campus mental health and indigenous language and culture, as well as various investigative reports. Among the outcomes: helping push the Student Counseling Act amendment through its third legislative reading; exposing the ghostwriting and commercial-camp ecosystem around learning portfolios; and hosting four consecutive years of the 2019 Curriculum Guidelines Forum, the first space in Taiwan where students and officials meet on equal footing, with the Minister of Education and cross-party legislators in attendance.

In November 2024, before stepping down, I announced EdYouth's three legislative priority arrows: the Youth Basic Act, amendments to the Civic Organizations Act, and amendments to the Student Counseling Act. On December 26, 2025, the Youth Basic Act passed its third legislative reading, with advocacy that continued after I left the organization.

Facing challenges and doubts

Working alongside partners, I also faced persistent doubts: "What gives you the right to represent all students in Taiwan?" Whenever that question came up, my answer was consistent: we don't claim to represent everyone, but we're committed to integrating as many student voices from different backgrounds as we can, while also noting the scope and limitations of our research in every report.

To avoid becoming an echo chamber, we actively sought exchanges with parent groups, teacher unions, civil servants, and local councilors. I strongly believe that students being the subjects of education policy is crucial, but so is the relationship between students and parents, and between students and teachers. Caring about the needs of all stakeholders, and building genuine interaction with them, was what allowed EdYouth to keep moving forward.

A co-authored book

In 2025 I co-authored Starting from Children: A Decade of Children's Rights in Taiwan (從孩子出發的大人練習課：台灣兒權十年紀實), alongside practitioners who have spent years working in children's and youth welfare. I was the youngest author. My chapter, "I'm a Student, Not a Guinea Pig," uses the CRC framework to trace the arc from being a first-cohort student under the 2019 Curriculum Guidelines to becoming a national advocate, examining how Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, specifically the right of children to express their views, plays out in Taiwan's context. Students aren't objects of policy. They're co-authors.

Build, then give it away

In late 2024, after two and a half years as founding chair, I stepped down voluntarily. The hardest part wasn't leaving. It was making sure the organization could run without me. Before I moved on to joining McKinsey, I spent the last stretch designing transition structures and a sustainability ecosystem, with the goal of converting EdYouth from a founder-dependent initiative into a civil-society organization built on institutional resilience.

It's still running. That's the part I'm most proud of.