Teach our children how to think

Teach our children how to think

Politics and religion may be taboo conversation subjects, but the subject of education in Thailand is always a great way to get the ball rolling. Everyone has a story to tell and everyone has an opinion to give. Not much of it is positive. The recent announcement by the Office of the Basic Education Commission (Obec) that schools are going to reduce class hours from eight hours a day to six in order to give children time for more extra-curricular activities has caused a lot more concern than praise. I don't think the quantity is going to make any difference, if the quality of teaching is not up to standard and you're not going to get quality teaching in the classroom if you can't pay teachers a reasonable salary. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Just to put things into perspective, according to figures from the 2015 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Switzerland is the country with the most well-paid teachers.

Teachers there earn an average annual salary of US$68,820, which makes it around 206,000 baht per month. Granted the cost of living is the highest in the world, so it figures.

The only two Asian countries on this list were Japan ($45,930) and Indonesia ($2,830). Thailand boasts an average salary for school teachers of $4,428 in comparison, which is still 10 times less that of Japan.

Salaries aside, a more significant factor is the mentality and attitude of teachers in Thailand. They can only teach what they have been programmed to teach and so the entire education system is at fault. How can Thailand compete in an English speaking world with the advent of the AEC when our own teachers can hardly speak a word of English? How can they teach children to think and analyse when they themselves have never been taught to do so? What hope do you have when a teacher beats up a student for asking a moral question and justifies his actions by saying he was just being a "good teacher"?

Has the "One Student One Tablet" project done anything to improve the situation or improve learning skills? I have yet to see any research being conducted on the success of this educational gimmick and I wonder whether any of those tablets are actually still being used to do what they were set out to do.

During the course of a dinner conversation the other day, my dinner companion, an architect turned marketing executive, was complaining that he has problems with new staff at the moment.

Not because they are not qualified. There are hundreds of graduates to choose from every year from all the top educational institutes. 

But there is a huge gap -- or chasm, to be more precise -- between what they have learned in class and how they are able to apply it to their work. There is a huge gap between textbooks and reality.

When it comes to actually getting the job done, they don't have a clue. That's because they don't realise that the theories that they learned were just tools of the trade and square pegs and round holes can actually coexist peacefully if you know how to make the most of each of them. 

Real life is full of challenges and what you've been taught should help you find the answers, not give you the answers, to those challenges. If your mind has not been trained to think, then you're in trouble. Being trained to think, I'm afraid, is not part of our curriculum.

So no matter how many hours our kids spend within the confines of a classroom, they will not be equipped for anything else other than passing government exams.

No matter how many more hours on extra-curricular activities they are assigned, they will not gain anything if their school is only equipped with one ping-pong table and five basketballs, a few half-broken musical instruments, or a computer room that is off-limits to students because teachers are not free to supervise.

Dare I say it, but the huge 36 billion baht budget under discussion for the purchase of three Chinese submarines could be put to much better use elsewhere, like the restructuring of the entire education system in Thailand, the retraining of all teachers, the reduction in the size of classes from 50 students to a more manageable 15-20 and a revision of the whole curriculum and exam format. How's that for a start?

If we want a true democracy, first teach the people how to think.

Usnisa Sukhsvasti is the features editor of the Bangkok Post.

Usnisa Sukhsvasti

Feature Editor

M.R. Usnisa Sukhsvasti is Bangkok Post’s features editor, a teacher at Chulalongkorn University and a social worker.

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