Caution urged on PM's education vision

A SENIOR TEACHER fears the teaching approach to Social Studies classes could go back to where it was more than three decades ago.

“Just like some 30 years back, students will be studying history and civic duty as separate subjects,” Panna Saengnapapen said.

She was speaking in response to the Education Ministry’s latest move to ensure that the National Council for Peace and Order chief General Prayuth Chan-ocha, who is now also the prime minister, achieves what he would like to see in the educational front. According to Prayuth, Thai children should learn more about history and civic duty.

At 58, Panna said she had seen various teaching methods introduced by the ministry. The current one focuses on the integration of content across many subjects put under the social studies, which covers history, geography, civic duty and more.

In Prayuth’s opinion, when history and civic duty are not taught as separate subjects, many children fail to recognise their importance.

The ministry has quickly responded to Prayuth’s wishes. Starting from the second semester of this year, students from Prathom 1 up to Mathayom 6 will have specific history and civic duty classes.

Organised by the Office of Basic Education Commission (Obec), a total of 1,206 master teachers will receive training programmes for the teaching of these two subjects this month and next month. The participants are expected to share their knowledge with other teachers fast enough for the history and civic duty classes to start by November.

Panna said teaching civic duty or history would not cause her any extra burden, but she felt the integrated approach would be a better option.

“When we have integrated the content, it’s easier for students to see the overall picture, to see that things are related,” she said. Students would not benefit much if teachers of civic duty focused on just this subject and failed to point out mistakes that humans had made in history.

“In my opinion, the content should be integrated,” Panna said, “If we treat any subject as something separate, we will in effect kill it.”

This veteran teacher lamented that authorities had never really debated ideas with teachers like her.

“They never asked us first, even though we were the ones teaching for well over three decades and having the good will of students,” she said. “What they have done is tell us what we are supposed to do.”

Panna is now teaching at the Poolcharoenwittayakhom School in Samut Prakan, a secondary school with 2,500 students.

“Our school has assigned the same teachers to handle many subjects so the content can be well integrated,” the school’s deputy director Chalarak Sai-utasana said.

Ladda Ketphan is one of the four social studies teachers at the Bangkok-based Matthayom Wat Nairong School. She now worries that available teaching staff won’t be able to handle the two extra subjects.

She also fears these additional classes will mean more homework, something Prayuth doesn’t want.

“If you tell me that civic duty will promote morality among students, I will have to say that all teachers have always sought to inculcate good habits and good values in their students,” Ladda said.

Natkamon Limpanachai, head of the social studies group at the school, said the revised curriculum would mean 40 more class hours for civic duty. “It means we will have to add one more class hour to students’ schedule each week,” she said.

Meanwhile, the history and civic duty content has always been present, a Chulalongkorn University (CU) academic said.

CU Faculty of Education dean’s assistant and lecturer Athapol Anunthavorasakul explained that Thailand had previously based its curriculum on the United Kingdom, which divided content into geography, history, civic duty and religion subjects. After World War II, Thai academics turned to American influence and pushed for these subjects to be grouped as social studies, together with civic duty, economics, geography, history and religion, he said. This approach has been part of teaching ever since. But people who hadn’t closely followed Thai education might not know that history and civic duty content still exists, he said. Influential people also wanted to emphasise the teaching of these two topics, because society was caught up in conflict, he added. He affirmed that social studies teachers, however, never felt that history and civic duty content were missing.

Athapol recommended that, in order to efficiently boost studying of these topics, the learning-teaching activities should include variety based on the students’ ages, educational level and content to emphasis. For example, primary students should learn social skills, including how to behave or negotiate - and social values such as respect for others, children’s duties and discipline. Primary pupils should not learn subject content through rote learning but teachers should place emphasis on the attitudes for harmonious co-existence in society. More content could be taught in lower secondary such as how forms of government were in line with economic ideologies, he said, then upper secondary level could expand more in readiness for higher education.

The learner development objectives should emphasise knowledge linkages and integration, he added.

“Children are learning a lot from the real world, so it would be good not to teach them by rote learning but by taking in real world examples, such as through case histories and news. Knowledge sought for teaching should include cultural diversity, laws, and forms of government. Students can’t just study these contents separately,” Athapol said.