The 2021 Presidential Education Award is released. Children of new immigrants overcome adversity and pursue their dreams
The winners of the 2021 Presidential Education Awards (2021總統教育獎) were recently announced. A total of 56 students won the awards, many of which were students from families of new immigrants. The mother of Kuo Tai-ming (郭台銘), who is studying at Liu-chia Junior High School (六嘉國中) in Chiayi County, is from Vietnam and is a new immigrant single-parent family.
In terms of schoolwork, Kuo Tai-ming is curious with good learning ability. He is ranked in the top ten throughout the year. With his hard work, he had won many awards in competitions when he graduated from elementary school. In the seventh grade of junior high school, he worked with his classmates to complete his first micro-film "Taste has No Boundaries", and he won second place in the 2018 "New Immigrant Children in Taiwan" national micro-film competition of the Ministry of Education (教育部, MOE).
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Huang Yi-chen, winner of the "2021 Presidential Education Award". Photo/Retrieved from Mandarin Daily News Facebook page
Huang Yi-chen, studying in Shetou Junior High School in Changhua County, is from a low-income new immigrant family. Due to cultural weakness and her father not able to work due to illness, the family depended on grandma's sock making and low-income subsidies for many years. In junior high school, Huang Yi-chen enrolled in physical education class. In her first year of junior high school, her coach saw her excellent potential, and with her coach’s encouragement, she focused on weightlifting.
Huang Yi-chen started to join competitions in 2018 and after many competitions, she was able to earn the right to compete abroad. In 2019, she won first place in women’s weightlifting competition in the county and national levels, and she represented Taiwan in the 2019 and 2020 Asian Youth and Youth Weightlifting Championships (亞洲青年暨青少年舉重錦標賽), and she won fifth and seventh places. In 2020, she broke the national weightlifting record at the Taiwan National Middle School Athletic Games (全國中等學校運動會) with a total of 147 kilograms. She has the potential to be Taiwan's first middle school student to be selected for the Asian Games, and to look forward to winning the Olympic medal in Paris in 2024.
The awarding ceremonies of the 2021 Presidential Education Awards (總統教育獎) are scheduled at the Presidential Palace on July 9th. President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) will present the award to each winning student. The MOE stated that the main objective of the President’s Education Award is to encourage outstanding students to overcome difficulties and to strive for progress, and to give them the strength to continue their efforts.
