For a Denla School vet, everything's academic

For a Denla School vet, everything's academic

Former lecturer Temyos Pandejpong is helping his family manage the education empire that began in his own childhood home.

Though he enjoyed his time in America, Mr Temyos says he has no regrets about coming back to Thailand to help his family run schools.
Though he enjoyed his time in America, Mr Temyos says he has no regrets about coming back to Thailand to help his family run schools.

Not many educators can say they spent their whole life devoted to education. Temyos Pandejpong grew up with education not only at the centre of his life, but as the entirety of his surroundings.

As a child he lived in the school his family ran, the Denla Kindergarten on Phetkasem Road. The youngest of three siblings, he helped in any way he could by taking calls and assisting his parents in day-to-day activities. His mother did all the cooking, while his father drove the school bus.

"Growing up, we never separated the house from the school," says Mr Temyos, who's 39. "Our father is of Chinese descent, so the family values are hard work, diligence, loyalty, and above all for East Asian people is a strong emphasis on education that goes all the way back to Confucius."

His parents came from humble roots, both being the first in their families to go to university. Their school started as more of a home school, a way for Mr Temyos's sister to get an early childhood education and a nice service provided to neighbours and friends.

What started with 17 students learning out of the family home has grown into a massive operation of three schools, two of which have about 1,400 students each, with the third, newly constructed, working up to that capacity.

Eventually Mr Temyos would grow into the position of running the school he grew up in under his father, Arn Pandejpong. But first he needed more schooling himself.

When he was 14, his parents decided he and his siblings needed an international education. They sent him to the US to study at a boarding school in Massachusetts, while older brother Toryos went to Oregon to get his master's degree.

Mr Temyos went on to get his bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University, followed by a PhD in operations management from Michigan State. He excelled in academia and earned the praise of his adviser, but around 2007 his family called him home to help run the family business.

"When you do a PhD, the path is to go on to teach or do research," Mr Temyos says. "It was quite innate for most PhD students to look for a job in academia, and I thought, naturally, I would find a teaching job at some college or university in the US. I did pretty good research and was pretty well published. My adviser was very disappointed when I said I had to go."

The choice was difficult for both Mr Temyos and his brother, who also worked in academia in Oregon. A choice between family obligation and self determination, filial piety and American individualism.

But his father needed help running their newly constructed kindergarten because the old one was running out of space, lacked parking spots and was starting to outgrow the neighbourhood.

The Denla British School fosters extracurricular involvement through an enhanced British curriculum mixed with 'Thainess'.

"It's probably the Asian/Thai thinking that we are obligated to the family, the Thai value that the family is who invests in you, sponsors you, so in return you must support whatever plan the family has," he says. "But in our case I wouldn't say so. If it's the case, it's only minor. Both of us are really passionate about this business and always knew it was something we would return to.

"But I could have used some more time in America. Sort of like a gap year."

In 2007, Mr Temyos returned to Bangkok to run the newly opened school on Rama V Road. His sister Denla, for whom the schools are named, received a master's degree from Harvard and pursued a career in medicine outside the family business.

Despite his uncertainty at the time of the move, Mr Temyos says he has no regrets about coming back to Thailand to help his family.

"Over the last few years, I couldn't imagine doing anything else," he says. "After you work in a school for a while, the job grows on you. You see so much impact it makes in the lives of the children and parents as well, and the impact it will have on society in the future."

He still kept one toe in academia, lecturing at Thammasat University, King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi and Mahidol University. But that had to stop when he and his brother embarked on their most ambitious endeavour yet, building the Denla British School in Nonthaburi. Unlike the other two schools that teach young children, this new school will eventually teach kids aged 2 to 18 with an innovate curriculum never before tested in Thailand.

The brothers see their school as a response to the coming automation crisis, where new jobs rapidly become obsolete amid shifting technologies, where workers will not only have to change jobs, but career paths, every 5-10 years.

"The liberal arts paradigm is going to be more relevant; it's not about learning a trade, but learning how to learn new things that will have to be adopted more and more," Mr Temyos says. "In the pyramid of employment, the bottom level will be replaced by robots, while the next level up will be replaced by AI."

The new school, which opened in 2017 after four years of development, takes this challenge head-on. In the younger grades, students learn a new musical instrument and play a new sport every year. They are confronted with a wide array of subjects, activities and extracurriculars to keep their young minds flexible in development, before eventually being narrowed down to where they excel in later years.

"In normal Thai schools, students have to make the decision between math and science or the arts, and most students who are good at math are pushed that way even if they are interested in history and other subjects," Mr Temyos says. "This system is becoming obsolete, so we have to make much more well-rounded individuals."

He and his brother looked at top independent schools in the United Kingdom to design the curriculum, a blend of the content-based approach of Shanghai and Singapore with the more New Age-y skills-based approach of Scandinavian countries. Ideally the programme should mould a crop of flexible, fast learners who still have their dates and formulas memorised.

Plans for the new school are still quite time-consuming, with a second phase of construction that will expand the school to hold a capacity of 1,500 students and add a new auditorium and student centre.

But when Mr Temyos has more time he plans to return to teaching on the side, his passion, in higher education.

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