To improve our education, we must revise objectives

Yongyuth wants the Office for National Education Standards and Quality Assessment to check schools randomly, instead of checking all schools, in order to reduce Onesqa’s workload. 

But he also wants them to be responsible for helping schools achieve quality standards, thus doubling Onesqa’s work.

What the deputy PM wants is akin to going into a hospital ICU overflowing with dying patients, telling doctors to check the vital signs of randomly selected patients only and doubling their duties. 

With a random selection of schools, there is no way to tell which specific institutions are improving and which aren’t. We won’t know which approaches work and which administrators/teachers are succeeding.

I suggest that “Education should have two objectives: first, to give definite knowledge, reading and writing, language and mathematics, and so on; secondly, to create those mental habits which will enable people to acquire knowledge and form sound judgements for themselves” (Bertrand Russell).

We have been going in the opposite direction, for “Our [education] system is all about one-way communication. Students have to memorise textbooks in order to pass exams, but they never learn [how] to think” (Olarn Chaiprawat, PhD, former president, Shinawatra University).

Onesqa should set key performance indicators based on education objectives as stated by Russell, and measure each and every school against them, posting school averages on the Internet, so parents can know what they’re paying for. 

School administrators and teachers would be evaluated and promoted on the basis of their students’ KPI achievements, eg, improvements in PISA scores. School fees would be whatever the market could bear, with the proviso that 100 per cent financial aid be available for half of each incoming class, so the underprivileged could access top-quality schools.

Burin Kantabutra