Educators sounded a warning this week that standards are slipping and students at many of our technical colleges are being taught outdated technology, a failing that could affect the nation's competitiveness when Asean workforces are partially integrated in 2015. It could also worsen existing problems by making it more difficult for industrial plants and factories to recruit skilled technical staff and for consumers to get increasingly complex "must-have" electronic devices fixed if they go wrong.
The problem is one that should have been anticipated. We live in a world in which new technologies are emerging and being developed at a pace that outstrips the ability of many of our technical college teachers to understand and then properly educate their students about. As a result, some vocational school students are being taught skills that are of little use in today's fast-moving world.
It is not the students' fault because those most in need of further education are often the teachers themselves. Of course they should be going on self-improvement and "refresher" courses but money for these is almost non-existent. That is why the Office of the Vocational Education Commission this week asked the government to allocate funds for teacher training and provide instructional media for teaching. It also seeks to fill a shortfall of 8,936 new vocational teachers throughout the country for the 2013 academic year at a cost of 1.6 billion baht if it can find them. A previous request was turned down.
It makes little sense to train vocational school students in the technicalities of fixing outmoded analogue CRT televisions when the country is switching over to digital flat screen TVs. Yet many teachers are unable to instruct their students in the maintenance and repair of widescreen TVs because they do not know how, claims one senior representative of the commission, citing a relevant example. Rapid advances are also being made in the fields of automotive engineering, telecoms, graphic design and computer maintenance for which a demand exists in the job market, but only for those who have been well trained.
Unfortunately that excludes a sizeable number of today's university graduates whose skills and areas of specialisation fail to match the needs of the labour market. For years they have been crammed into large classes and required to learn from teachers whose own depth of knowledge and motivation may have been lacking, especially in language teaching. As a result, hundreds of thousands of students usually remain unemployed months after receiving their coveted degrees. These degrees have already been widely devalued by the common practice of listing them as entry-level requirements for the most mundane of jobs, an indication that some employers are losing confidence in traditional educational qualifications. In contrast, those receiving diplomas certifying satisfactory completion of occupational training courses tend to do rather better because they have manual skills that are much in demand.
We live in an age of increasing job specialisation where advanced skill sets are sought after. This is why students need dedicated knowledgeable teachers who can provide proper career guidance and information on market trends. Administrators and those allocating budgets who fail to recognise this are short-changing their students and disrupting the smooth running of the country, as it leads to unnecessary training and re-training of the newly-emerging work force. Our education system suffers from a shortage of investment and an excess of muddled thinking. Compounding this is the whole outdated system of learning by rote which stifles initiative, a lack of encouragement for critical, innovative thinking and the overall inflexibility that leaves students largely unprepared for the tough, unforgiving world beyond the campus gates.