The new Unesco Global Education Monitoring Report is one of the first major UN reports to respond to the new 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The report, Education for People and Planet, reveals a picture of great inequality of opportunity, with data suggesting the world will not achieve the 2030 Agenda goal of universal primary education until 2042, universal lower secondary in 2059, and universal upper secondary in 2084.
In Thailand alone, 380,000 children are out of school, and the quality of education is so poor that the World Bank has estimated one third of Thai youth are functionally illiterate.
Educational quality is now interwoven with all the 2015 UN SDGs. For instance, it is widely accepted that education is key to eliminating poverty. But, the report notes that in both Thai urban and rural areas, there are extreme wealth differences. The incidence of poverty nationally stands at 13% of the total population according to the 2014 UN Thailand Human Development Report.
Some provinces are utterly poverty-stricken. In Nakhon Phanom, Chaiyaphum, Si Sa Ket and Buri Ram in the Northeast and Pattani in the deep South, poverty tops 30%, with the western provinces of Ratchaburi (30%), Kanchanaburi (33%), Tak (44%) and Mae Hong Son (60%) worst of all.
The report notes that education systems must take care to respect minority cultures by making education universally equally accessible in a culturally responsive manner, another SDG, such as by using associated languages. If this is not done, the result is major socio-economic inequity.
In Thailand's western provinces, children from mountain peoples ethnic communities, such as the Karen, are forced to learn in a language other than the mother tongue, with not even dual-language education available.
Thus, they are immediately disadvantaged when seeking to enter the national and international job markets. For example, in 2013 85% of Czech students demonstrated a functional working knowledge of computers and only 13% of Thai children, the best educated, had this ability.
In the deep South provinces, national IQ testing has revealed students' average IQ falls in a "low" range in all three provinces -- as low as 88 in Narathiwat -- and in the low range in 17 out of 19 provinces in the Northeast.
Provincial IQ's under 95, as in Pattani in the deep South and Kalasin and Rot Et in the Northeast, suggest schools are not properly teaching logical-mathematical skills; or the children are demotivated, feel excluded, and reject the education system; or the children do not understand standard Thai enough to understand the education system; or diseases of poverty such as malnutrition and iodine deficiency are ruining children's educations.
An IQ score of 88 can only be obtained if a combination of these factors are at work. Moreover, nationally, 6.5% of children are abnormally low mentally compared to the international benchmark of 2.5%.
At provincial levels, in basic O-Net subjects like English and Thai, the three deep South provinces score worst, and no northeastern province breaks into the top 40. In the last publicly available O-Net scores for Thai, the top 10 was dominated by Central Region provinces, with only Chon Buri in the East, Chiang Mai in the North, and Songkhla in the South scoring in the first 10.
The SDGs also emphasise the interrelationship between education and environmental sustainability. Indeed, level of educational attainment is one of the best indicators of global climate change awareness. Yet, half the world's countries do not explicitly mention climate change or environmental sustainability in their educational curricula.
Even in developed OECD countries, 40% of 15-year-olds only have a basic knowledge of environmental issues. Thailand, though it covers environmental sustainability in its curriculum, does not practice as it preaches and is now one of the top 25 global greenhouse gas polluters. Rapid growth is at the expense of the environment, and Thailand's education system has not yet created a public willing to lobby the government to implement proper waste management systems, whether community-based collection services or gasification.
The effects of this black hole regarding education are damning. A report by the Ocean Conservancy and the McKinsey Centre for Business and Environment revealed earlier this year that 60% of the plastics in our oceans come from five countries, including Thailand, with the other countries being China, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Shockingly, within 10 years, plastic consumption in Asia is projected to increase 80% to 200 million tonnes, with one tonne of plastic in our seas for every three tonnes of fish. In response, Thais must insist supermarkets should charge for plastic bags, people must not throw plastics away, and high-standard waste-to-energy and materials recycling facilities need to be established.
The Unesco report emphasises the need of integrated planning by governments and ministries in order to solve complicated problems, such as the interrelationships between identity and culture, education and sustainable development. This means key Thai ministries overseeing education, labour and the environment collaborating to help the country solve its inequity of education between cultures, to provide equal access to the job market, and to address the environmental problems.
The approach must be holistic. As Unesco Director-General Irina Bokova said at the report's release, "A fundamental change is needed in the way we think about education's role in global development. Now, more than ever, education has a responsibility to be in gear with 21st century challenges and aspirations, and foster the right types of values and skills that will lead to sustainable and inclusive growth, and peaceful living together."
The recent G20 Summit prompted a commitment by both the US and China to the Paris Agreement on global climate change. There, the Chinese premier explicitly linked societal education and academic research with securing green mountains and blue skies, via specific targets for water and energy consumption and CO2 output. The Thai people have yet to hear such a clear commitment from the Prayut Chan-o-cha government, presently Chair of the G77, as to how its own education system can secure an equitable, sustainable future.