Parents crucial amid this crisis in Thai learning
Last year one of the knights of the Have Your Say Round Table, Nigel Pike, wrote a letter about his hours spent at home teaching the kids in the holidays.
The effort is commendable, especially given the appalling state of education in Thailand (see the falling PISA and university rankings).
This national crisis of learning will only be reversed when students are encouraged to speak up rather than silently absorb information.
Some years ago a foreign teacher here asked his Thai students to approach him in the non-hierarchical “Western” way. His fellow Thai teachers objected to this: the idea was just too radical in conservative and hierarchal Thai society. The rote system of one-way dictation from teacher to students remained in place at the school, as it does throughout the Thai education system.
To encourage my own son’s curiosity and thirst for knowledge, I have translated articles written by myself into Thai so that he can read one a week and we can then discuss the topics. They include Thailand 4.0, the middle-income trap, how knowledge of English affects job prospects, our ageing society and its consequences, etc.
He’s a Mattayom-1/lower secondary student and the “homework” should give him general knowledge useful to “survival” in 21st-century Thailand.
Hopefully it also helps lead him to a job that is not vulnerable to automation. That’s another topic we might be discussing in the weeks to come.
Dirk Sumter
