Education in Thailand part 3

Overview & History

Education in state schools is free and compulsory from Grade 1 through Grade 9, with access to two years of pre-school (anuban). All children attend school, including minority and stateless ethnic groups which may however be excluded from government secondary or higher education until their personal documentation is resolved. The government is not able to cope with the entire number of students and the private sector, which is supervised by the government, provides a significant contribution. Private international schools are allowed to follow British or American curricula. The level of education in the private sector is generally, but not always, higher than that of the government schools. Expensive, exclusive private and international schools provide for an exceptionally high level of achievement and a large number of their students continue their education in renowned American and British universities. Caritative organisations (Christian religious and parochial schools) provide the backbone of non-government, low-fee, general education and some established universities, and the standard is relatively high. Cheaper, newer and individual private schools, are occasionally run more for profit and government subsidies, than for results, and are often indistinguishable from government schools in terms of quality of buildings, resources, teaching competency, and overcrowded classrooms; the only real benefit is the prestige afforded to the parents for schooling their children in the private sector - academic superiority is sometimes barely measurable.

Education in Thailand is generally well organised, if on the government’s own admission, of a low academic standard compared to the development and modernisation of the country as a whole: Dr. Kasam Wattanachai, Privy Councellor to the King, August 10, 2002 “Ability of students down to the level of Laos - other countries are taking the lead.” Structured education on the lines of education in developed countries was slow to evolve. Unlike other parts of south and southeast Asia particularly the Indian subcontinent, Myanmar (Burma), Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Malay Peninsula, Indonesia and the Philippines which had all benefited from the influence of countries with centuries of educational tradition, Thailand has never been colonised and had not featured heavily on trade routes or explorers' trails to Central and East Asia. Formal education has its early origins in the temple schools, available to boys only, which began when the King set up a Department of Education with the aid of foreign - mainly English - advisers in 1887. The first university, Chulalongkorn, was not established until 1917.

The revolution in 1932 that transferred absolute power from the king to democratic government encouraged further development and expansion of schools and tertiary institutions. In 1961, the government began a series of five-year plans, and many of the extant purpose-built school buildings, particularly the wooden village primary schools, and the early concrete secondary schools date from around this time. Almost all villages have a primary school, most sub-districts tambon have a school providing education from Grade 1 through Grade 9, and all districts amphoe have secondary schools of Grade 7 through 12, and many have vocational colleges for students from grade 10. In rural schools absenteeism of both students and teachers is high due to family and farming commitments -in fact some schools close down during the periods of rice planting and harvesting.

Most of the established universities in the 21st century have faculties of education, where the teacher training is now based on child centred learning, and the standard is high. However, those who graduate as teachers will invariably seek positions in the private sector. Many students enroll in the faculties of education not with the intention of pursuing a teaching career, but to benefit from the superior quality of foreign language instruction. The mainstay of the teacher output is provided by the government Rajaphat Universities (formerly Rajaphat Institutes), the traditional teacher training colleges in each province, where the acquired knowledge and competency at first degree level is often comparable to the level of an American senior High School graduation, a British A-level, a French Baccalauriat, or a German Abitur. Apart from the security of being a civil servant with guaranteed employment and a pension, and the extraordinary cultural respect for the profession, there is little incentive to choose a future as a teacher in a government school. As a result, most classes in secondary schools are overcrowded with often as many as sixty students in a classroom, a situation which continues to favour the rote system that is firmly anchored in Thai culture, as the only method possible.

Students, even those in primary schools, are becoming aware of the shortfalls in the quality of their state education, but their own culture prevents them from challenging the system. In total contrast to Chinese philosophy, students are not encouraged to develop analytical and critical thinking skills, which is clearly demonstrated by their inability to grasp the fundamentals of chess, grasp a notion through context, do a crossword puzzle, or follow the plot of a complex thriller or motion picture; indeed, to do so would be to expose their teachers to the embarrassment of losing face. Likewise, the teachers will avoid introducing dialogue into the classroom or eliciting response from the students - in spite of demonstrating enthusiasm, to give a wrong answer would be to lose face in the presence of one’s peers. Dr. Adith Cheosokul, Professor, Chulalongkorn University, September 1, 2002: “Thai kids have no courage to question their teachers… foreign students are very eager to communicate with their teachers. The Thais are usually silent in class. I think it’s the culture. Our students tend to uphold teachers as demi-gods.” As teaching by rote is also easy and requires little pedagogic skill, once qualified, - apart from weekend seminars which, being more fun than form, are considered to be part of the reward system - teachers tend to resist attempts to encourage them to engage in any forms of further training to improve their subject knowledge and to adopt new methodologies which will require them to use more initiative and to be more creative. Some teachers in secondary schools, particularly those in their 40's, consider the essential form of an English language lesson to be the delivery of a straight lecture, in Thai, on some obscure element of higher linguistics to a class of teenagers. Prime Minister Taksin Shinwatra, August 18, 2002: “Teachers must radically change their way of thinking - I’m not sure they can do this.” The essence of education therefore still hinges first and foremost on the traditional values of Buddhism, respect for the king, the monkhood, and the family, (in that order) through the rote method, and whilst indisputably very noble, these features are the main hurdle to the implementation of modern educational methodology and the development of a Western cultural approach to communication in order to strengthen the country’s credibility in the world’s cultural and political theatres, and to reinforce its position in the global market.

Primary and secondary school teachers do not enjoy the same long breaks as the students and are required to work through the vacations on administrative duties. Many of these tasks concern their familiarisation with the frequent changes in the National Curriculum, and preparing and submitting lesson plans for every lesson they will give in the forthcoming semester; indeed, changes occur faster than authors can write and publishers can print new textbooks - new batches of thousands of textbooks ordered at the end of the previous semester are already obsolete by the time they are delivered during the vacation and will gather dust in the store room. The teachers will be left to improvise the teaching of a new or modified syllabus, without support material, and have to design their own tests and exams - neither of which is conducive to an improvement in quality. The constant changes are considered by many to be ‘one step forward, two steps back’. Often one department of the Ministry of Education is not aware of the work of another, and the principals and the teachers in the schools are always at the end of the information chain.

The years from 2001 to 2006 showed some of the greatest improvements in education, such as computers in the schools and an increase in the number of qualified native speaker teachers for foreign languages. Experiments had also been tried with restructuring the administrative regions for education or partly decentralising the responsibility of education to the provinces. By 2008, however, little real change had been felt, and many experiments to establish a clear form of university entrance qualification had also failed due to combinations of political interference, attempts to confer independence (or to remove it) on the universities, huge administrative errors, and inappropriate or mismatched syllabuses in the schools. The debate over the setting of new requirements, subjects, exams and standards for university entrance has been raging since 2003 and by late 2007 had shown no signs of being resolved. On return to democracy in early 2008, after the December election, the newly formed coalition led by the People's Power Party (a party formed by the remnants of deposed Taksin Shinwatra’s Thai Rak Tai party) announced new allocations of funds for education, an increase in the number of teachers, and more changes to the national curriculum and university entrance system.