Endorsing a national language policy

Endorsing a national language policy

A Muslim girl at a school in Yala. Reports by Unicef encourage the integration of the mother tongue in schools in the restive South and also those in the North and Northeast. Patipat Janthong
A Muslim girl at a school in Yala. Reports by Unicef encourage the integration of the mother tongue in schools in the restive South and also those in the North and Northeast. Patipat Janthong

There is a rising need for countries, including Thailand, to promote the mother tongue as a way to overcome problems involving the inclusion of ethnic minorities and their stake in not just education systems but in the nations themselves.

This need is reflected in a number of reports by Unicef on a language education and social cohesion (LESC) initiative in Thailand and two other Asean countries, namely Myanmar and Malaysia.

Within the Thai context, the Unicef emphasis is on the Thai Malays in the Deep South. This is appropriate considering the loss of life in the region, estimated at 7,000 by Deep South Watch over the past decade.

The risk of exclusion and the breakdown of social cohesion is a persistent threat. This is especially true for the children who live in the conflict zones, where every day is a day lived in fear, every trip to school the possibility of an ambush, every new bump in the road a potential bomb.

The fears and dangers experienced by the children of these “red zones” have been well documented in a previous Unicef report in 2008. In what makes grim reading, the socio-psychological effects of the southern insurgency on the thousands of children there are examined in great detail.

Children in the Deep South have experiences too awful to comprehend: seeing decapitated corpses; being involved in fights between soldiers and insurgents; seeing shops, vehicles, and people being blown apart; witnessing assassinations; being ambushed on trips to school; and seeing their teachers killed and schools burnt down.

Some of the recommendations of the 2008 Unicef report are especially applicable to the present situation.

They call for promoting an awareness of children’s rights and child protection, in both the Pattani-Malay and Thai languages, among civil society and within all armed groups, including the military and police.

Furthermore, peace-building education and activities should be developed for children in both state schools and religious schools, through formal and non-formal education programmes.

The 2013-2015 LESC initiative is designed to be a milestone, contributing to these goals by increasing the capacity of institutions to supply conflict-sensitive education for peace-building.

It is a key component of the Unicef East Asia and the Pacific Regional Office in a four-year global Peacebuilding, Education and Advocacy Programme.

As noted by Thomas Davin, the Unicef country representative, “Unicef firmly believes that every child has a right to quality education and is committed to supporting the Thai government to bring mother-tongue and bilingual education opportunities to all children in Thailand, for better learning outcomes and greater social cohesion.”

The initiative’s key findings include recommendations for interventions, such as facilitated dialogue in areas where language is a source of tension, especially to develop language policy. Facilitated dialogues are important because they can lead to collaborative decision-making involving the entire community, together with officials.

Furthermore, these bottom-up initiatives can and should inform government policy, such as what languages are taught at schools.

It is necessary to bridge the gap between the perceptions of the community and of officials in the area of language education. In the Deep South it is clear from pilot courses run by Mahidol University, in partnership with Unicef, that people want to be multilingual — able to read and write Thai, Melayu and Arabic at a minimum.

The programme, put in place since 2009, aims at improving education standard through basic mechanism like improving the efficiency of teaching through greater comprehension, increasing the prestige of the mother tongue (MT), and enhancing the stake of MT speakers. As a result, it significantly improves children’s learning in all academic subjects.

The key is how and when to introduce Thai to children, not just those of the Deep South but of other ethnic communities, like the country’s mountain peoples.

This implies reforms in assessing competence in the Thai language in multilingual communities in both primary and secondary schools, dialogues on how and when to introduce English, and consideration of which multilingualism models produce the best language outcomes.

In the Deep South, implementing these recommendations is crucial. Every year, thousands of students there take standardised tests. And every year, these students fail these exams. Provincial data shows children in the three provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat consistently score the lowest in the country.

Every year, because of linguistic and cultural barriers, they are penalised by the system, unable to access higher education in Thailand and consequently driven to Arabic-speaking countries to study.

Without hope, without a stake in society, most of these children will feel excluded from society. And because of that, some, especially boys, will turn to drugs and crime and will become radicalised.

And it is not just the children of the red zones who are affected by this radicalisation process.

The children of the Northeast and of the North — in fact, all children on the periphery — fail to achieve the same level of educational attainment of those in the Central Plains and Bangkok because of linguistic, cultural and socio-economic exclusion.

In order to consolidate the Deep South experience, the Thai government needs to unite a disparate group of pilot studies and projects throughout the country, presently funded by state agencies, the EU and private charities.

These efforts can be consolidated under the umbrella of a state-sponsored national coalition to promote the wider use of the Mahidol approach, under the aegis of the Office of the Royal Society’s National Language Policy (NLP) initiative and advised by development partners such as Unicef.

Such a coordinated national commitment to a language policy will ensure greater inclusion, and therefore social cohesion, if written into the new constitution.

Presently, this is doubtful without a correspondingly greater dedication to all Thailand’s children.


John Draper is Project Officer, Isan Culture Maintenance and Revitalisation Programme (ICMRP), College of Local Administration (COLA), Khon Kaen University. Peerasit Kamnuansilpa, Phd, is founder and former dean of the College of Local Administration, Khon Kaen University.

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