A controversy was sparked by a parent's post complaining that their child was being forced to learn Hokkien at school even though the family's home language is Mandarin. The parent argued that the time would be better spent learning English instead.
Many people responded that if they felt learning Hokkien was a waste of time, they could instead choose a sign language or a Southeast Asian immigrant language.
Many of the Taiwanese Hokkien activists I spoke to said they dreamed that one day Hokkien would replace Mandarin as the interethnic lingua franca. They saw this as a way to redress the historical injustice inflicted on Hokkien under the KMT regime. At the same time, however, they admitted that this was unlikely to happen. They also acknowledged that they themselves mostly used Mandarin when speaking to strangers.
I think the Taiwanese government does not intend to change the status quo, in which Mandarin has already become the de facto mother tongue of most Taiwanese people. It is the language in which most people engage in higher-level thinking and express complex ideas. That role is taken for granted.
Rather, the government's aim is to raise awareness that Taiwan is a multicultural and multilingual society by ensuring that children have at least some exposure to the non-Mandarin languages spoken in Taiwan. The goal of local language education is not to replace Mandarin by nurturing a generation of students who write academic papers in Hokkien.
In a sense, the vision is somewhat similar to that of Ireland, where people take great pride in the Irish language even though relatively few speak it fluently. Many can at least say a few phrases or sing a song or two in Irish. The idea is something along those lines.
