Whether it’s 12 or 15 years, how can ‘free’ schooling get better?

“You know why?” asked Dr Kamjorn Tatiyakul, providing the answer without any prompting: “Because for most Thais, anything free is inferior. They think if their kids get free education, the schools can’t be very good.”

That’s probably why the permanent secretary of the education ministry, one of the most experienced experts in this field, took pains to explain the need for General Prayut Chan-o-cha, as head of the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), to exercise his all-embracing power once more to effect a major change in the country’s education system.

The first move under Order No 44 to effect changes at the ministry was to shake up the organisational structure to enable the education minister to wield authority over the management of the country’s education ministry – following repeated complaints that as education minister, General Dapong Rattanasuwan couldn’t fire even a junior teacher due to the long-established “decentralised system”.

The second “bomb” thrown at the ministry was less dramatic but no less significant. This time, it was supposed to lay down a clear policy to make “free education” effective for 15 years, from kindergarten to senior high school.

That came about after a heated debate over Section 54 in the draft constitution that specified 12 years of free schooling “from kindergarten to compulsory high school”. Suspicious minds immediately interpreted that to mean the new charter requires students to pay for their own three years of senior high school, including vocational training after the “compulsory high school terms”. The criticism wasn’t aimed at the Constitution Drafting Commission alone. The government also came under attack, whether or not it was behind this clause. That prompted Prime Minister Prayut and Education Minister Dapong to take note. Whose idea was it to pin the government in a corner?

“That’s why the government asked the NCPO to use its power to decree this new order, making it absolutely clear that the 15-year no-expense education policy is still very much in effect and there is no intention to make any change to that,” Dr Kamjorn insisted.

In his own explanation, what the draft charter says and what the government does are two totally different things. There is no denying that such contradictions will inevitably create confusion – and one can’t blame critics for suspecting that the charter drafters might have been urged on by some powerful people in the government to “sneak in” that provision to lessen the government’s financial burden.

That, according to the education minister, was not the case at all. In fact, apart from making sure that free schooling remains valid for 15 years, the ministry is also embarking on a series of projects to make sure that what is “free” isn’t necessarily “inferior”.

The education permanent secretary cited the attempt to reduce the number of Grade 1 students who can’t read and write in the past year or so as having seen some concrete results. “The number of Grade 1 kids who cannot read and write has gone down to 3 per cent -- and they are mostly young children in remote areas such as hilltribes whose first language wasn’t Thai,” he said.

He also said to improve the quality of schooling, distance-learning had been implemented on a large scale to enable students in the rural areas to have access to the best teachers through satellite and Internet connections.

The problem of inequality in terms of access to the best teaching staff and materials between students in the provinces and those in Bangkok has always been a serious, intractable one. The quality of schools, teachers, Internet access etc in the rural areas has consistently been considered “second class” compared with those in the capital and major cities. If the gap has to be narrowed, genuine efforts will have to be ranked at the top of the list of priorities.

It’s not clear whether the formation of provincial education development committees headed by respective governors would prove to be more than just another bureaucratic mechanism bogged down by red tape and inefficiency. But Dr Kamjorn seemed, in his interview on Radio Chula recently, to have placed high hope on the provincial governors getting themselves seriously involved in managing the local education systems in line with their distinctive demands and conditions.

There will no doubt be sceptics who will cast doubts on the government’s positive spin on the new education drive. But as some long-time observers in this field have said: “We have reached the bottom. Every small step is already a great improvement over the past.”