A fresh approach to education

Mechai Viravaidya, founder of the Population and Community Development Association (PDA) says that education has to be fun in order to engage youth.

Monkey see, monkey do — The 'Safe Sex Shrine' at Cabbages and Condoms.

Surrounded by palm trees and fairy lights in his Cabbages and Condoms restaurant, Mechai Viravaidya is in ebullient mood. “Luckily, I haven’t been overeducated,” quips the founder of the Population and Community Development Association (PDA) when asked by learning post for the recipe behind his success. “The more qualified you are, the narrower you are. A lot of original things come from people whose thinking has not been compartmentalised.”

Khun Mechai has been celebrated across Thailand, indeed around the world, for going against the grain and bringing about positive change as a result, perhaps most famously when Thailand faced a potentially catastrophic onslaught from AIDS in the late 1980’s.

Whilst ministers and health officials attempted to ignore the stark reality, Mechai decided that education was the country’s only saving grace and set about promoting safe sex. Armed with condoms and a sense of humour, Mechai took his message across the land and everyone began to take note. Today, Thailand’s AIDS problem is still with us but the country has managed to avoid a catastrophe – arguably thanks to the stand taken by Mechai and his colleagues against the prevailing apathy of the time.

Since setting up the PDA in 1974, primarily as an NGO to promote family planning and rural self-development, Mechai Viravaidya has been active in public life. He is currently a senator as well as Chairman of the PDA and continues to relentlessly pursue initiatives designed to help those in disadvantaged rural areas. His organisation also works to connect with youth, guiding and training them to become ambassadors and leaders within their own communities.

Mechai himself had a varied education that began in Thailand where he was educated at Christian and Buddhist schools. His Thai father and Scottish mother were both doctors and held a very open view of religion.

They dared to be different, recalls Mechai. His parents let him find out about both religions so that when he was old enough, he could decide what religion he wanted to follow. “I think that’s a wonderful gift that any parent can give,” he says. “I’ve been given a great liberty that very few people have enjoyed in life – I’ve had real freedom of religion.”

However, the education system he encountered did very little to inspire the young Mechai. “What I was being taught was, at best, that one could reach mediocrity,” he says. “You simply learned to repeat, for instance, that two plus two equals four. All you could make was four. You couldn’t make it four with a leg or four with a tail. Ordinary education teaches you to climb to the highest level of mediocrity.”

At 13, young Mechai was flown on a tortuous relay of flights to Australia, where he continued his education at the prestigious Geelong Grammar School in Melbourne. There, he was taught to use his initiative and imagination.

“The education was still very much the same but there was more variety and it was more stimulating,” he remembers. “They taught you about the human side of things, like how to be a team player and why wealth is not important. I also learned that honesty doesn’t mean that when somebody doesn’t catch you out, you’re right. No. If you yourself know you’ve done wrong – it’s wrong.”

The experiences of his youth have very much shaped Mechai’s educational philosophy. He believes that education can be most beneficial when students are encouraged to add to the learning process. “You should let young people see some other angle of education rather than the narrow confines,” he says.

To prove his point, Mechai cites the example of Lam Plai Mat School in Buri Ram – a school he set up in one of the poorest districts of Thailand with the help of a wealthy British businessman. Currently, the school has a cohort of kindergarten and first graders, all of whom are selected from the community based on one simple criterion – luck. Such is the popularity of the curriculum there, prospective students must enter a lottery and a free place is granted to the fortunate winners. No-one can influence the outcome, not even the Prime Minister, jokes Mechai.

The school places great emphasis on learning-centred teaching and lessons are very hands on. For example, students may learn about a new vegetable. But instead of simply reading about it in a textbook, they will go to the market and buy the vegetable, ask the vendor how it is grown, take it back to school, then wash it and cook it with the kitchen staff.

“It’s a school for kids who are at the end of the scale of opportunity but they’re alert and they’re very good,” notes Mechai enthusiastically. “Parents in the community can see the difference in terms of the way the kids are questioning everything around them.”

Mechai promotes a healthy lifestyle

The Population and Community Development Association has, over the years, made a marked contribution to education in Thailand. When the organisation was founded, it was deemed that the rural population was growing too fast, making sustainable development difficult. So PDA sought to educate those in rural areas on the advantages of birth control.

With the arrival of AIDS, things changed. It seemed that youth were becoming increasingly sexually active without any guidance from the community on how to be both safe and controlled, so the project took on a greater urgency and importance.

One initiative that developed out of the crisis was a programme designed to give responsibility to teenagers in educating their peers on this delicate issue.

“Youth are smart and if you don’t recognise that, whatever you do, you turn them off,” says Mechai. “You have to get them to be your ally rather than your enemy.”

Mechai’s restaurant, named ‘Cabbages and Condoms’ to reflect his belief that condoms should be as attainable in any village as cabbages, was set up to help fund the PDA. It also houses a purpose-built classroom where students from different schools are brought in to learn about sexual responsibility and safety.

“We bring kids in, school by school, sit down with them and tell them that they are the owners of society today and the owners of tomorrow,” explains Mechai. “We say ‘there are things going on in society that we all consider inappropriate and need to be corrected, issues to do with sex and drugs and alcohol. Do you agree?’ And they agree. Then we ask them if there is a way to change it. ‘Let’s think’, we say, ‘you are all the same generation. How would you convince others to change? What materials would you use so that it would be interesting for your peers to learn?’”

Whilst in the class, sometimes taught by Mechai himself, the students will discuss all manner of social issues that relate directly to them. The approach veers very much from the usual teacher-led lecture. Instead, students are treated as mature young men and women with an acquired knowledge that can be tapped. Along with reference to educational resources, they can dispel myths and learn facts as well as explore such issues as sexually transmitted diseases and the ethics of sleeping around – all within a comfortable and constructive environment. Importantly, the absence of any imposed morality engages the students far more because they are being trusted rather than talked down to.

At the moment, students who attend these classes are expected to take the knowledge they have learned back into their schools, thereby gaining some responsibility for input into their school’s ‘life-skills’ curriculum. This can be of benefit to their peers because they bring with them a high degree of empathy. “Make the students part of the teaching process so that it’s not belittling,” suggests Mechai. “Then they feel that it is their situation, their problem and that they have to be the ones to work together to make it as safe as possible for their generation.”

Mechai revealed plans to expand the project by opening a coffee shop next to the present classroom. “It’s going to be a life-skills and sex education centre – very traditional with lots of information and books. But we’ll make it into a coffee bar where they can come and find out all the information about sex education. We’ll also have photos, CDs, a website, a hotline with volunteer youth answering the phones and maybe a radio station.”

Even parents and teachers will be welcomed as Mechai thinks it important that they understand the education their children are getting. “The kids expand the horizons of those two groups,” he adds.

If the project is a success, PDA hope to open more coffee shops across Bangkok and perhaps in other provinces. And what name will be given to these illustrious institutions? Coffee and Condoms, of course!

Mechai Viravaidya has long been critical of the machinations of government, especially as far as corruption is concerned. “We believe we need to train the next generation to be leaders of many forms including government,” says Mechai, “because we are not particularly satisfied with the quality that exists today.”

The resulting scheme is called the Village Youth Government and it works like this: each village, which usually has around one hundred households, elects eight youth ‘ministers’ – half of them female and half male, aged 18-24. PDA trains the youths how to identify key issues within their communities and how they might successfully resolve them.

They are also given a budget by PDA, though this is mainly to cover administration costs. In order to fund projects that will benefit the community, the ‘ministers’ are trained to put proposals together and approach local businesses for support.

A Youth Government from one village, for example, enlisted the local community to help plant 10,000 trees in the area. They persuaded a company to give them 10 baht per tree, which resulted in a tidy sum of money to finance other projects.

“They learn how to identify problems and solutions and where to get the resources,” observes Mechai. “Businesses are very impressed by these kids. Actually, when the elderly people saw the youth government, they said ‘why can’t we have an elderly government?’ We thought that was a good idea, they’ve got time, so now we are going to have one and they’ve decided that 55 is the age you can join. They’ll do many things that the youth do as a business but when the youth go to school, the elderly people can be the employees. We’re bringing generation one and generation three together. It’s great. The older people don’t feel that they don’t understand the kids because they’re going to be working together and the younger generation will have a chance to learn from the older generation about values and other things.”

The project has been running for five years and is such a success that many of the young ‘ministers’ have gone on to become elected council officials in their districts.

There appears to be no limit to Mechai’s resourcefulness and energy, especially with regards to educating the disadvantaged here in Thailand. “This is the future of PDA,” he says with a smile. “People say we need another Mechai. I say no you don’t. You need 50,000 mini Mechais and that’s what’s happening. We’re just getting people to do at the village level what I used to do with my colleagues here.”