Education straitjacket is preventing Thailand developing
Re: “Look at the bog picture of Thai education – disaster is looming”, Have Your Say, yesterday.
I agree with Dirk Sumter’s thoughts on the state of the Thai education system. The people who preside over the current parlous state of affairs lack basic judgement, it seems to me, as archaic and needlessly baroque systems are hobbling meaningful progress. This extends to helping Thai students to learn how to think for themselves, as I struggle to do against the state system’s straitjacketed modus operandi.
Thailand likes to project itself as the second-largest economy in this region, while conspicuously ignoring its position in the global hierarchy. As I have said before in these pages, another barometer of rank is the number of Thai universities in the world’s top 500. See if you can find any.
Having spent many years working in higher education in the UK and now in Thailand, I can’t help but do a “compare and contrast” between the two systems, and note the chasm that separates them. This gap absolutely has to be closed in my view, if Thailand seriously wants to be a “developed” nation.
Mr Sumter offers some further insightful thinking regarding this state of affairs; he is correct in his statement that education is the main lifeline to progress. Take a look at South Korea as the prime exemplar; devastated after the Korean War it invested heavily in its education assets, and rose to become the world’s 11th-largest economy.
Even Tony Blair got it right, with this mantra: “Education, education, education.”
Dr Frank
Bangkok
