Gripping the stairway railing with my right hand and my crutches with my left, I hobbled up the stairs of the tutoring school my parents had enrolled me in. Each step sent a small jolt of pain through my leg, which I had broken several weeks earlier.
It was both figuratively and literally a pain to go to those chemistry lessons, but what choice did my teenage self have? My parents had paid a fortune for them, my friends were pulling ahead of me in school, and I needed to score well on the upcoming university admissions exams.
I was one among the 500,000 students every year who contribute to the massive 10 billion-baht tutoring school industry in Thailand -- a byproduct of poor public school education.
Thailand's education landscape is largely dependent on university admissions exams. Students' high school GPA accounts for 20% while standardised exams comprise the remaining 80%. Due to this competitive structure, students pick university programmes based on what their final score allows them to study, not what they actually want to study.
Majors requiring the highest scores are medicine and engineering. The lowest? Teaching.
The perception of teaching as a low-value career is another of the many problems with the education system. There is no merit, respect, nor pride around the profession. Students with low scores end up with teaching majors and go on to become public school teachers.
They find themselves ill-equipped to prep students for the extremely competitive university admissions exams, leaving parents with no choice but to send their kids to private tutoring schools.
Students need the help. Thais performed abysmally on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2015, a test of half a million 15-year-olds across the globe. We ranked well-below OECD averages across all subjects. Out of 70 countries, our students ranked 54th for science and math, and 57th for reading.
Even more worrisome is that Thai youth have lost agency and autonomy in learning. Parents place them in tutoring schools from early ages, making them reliant on tutors. Those who manage to get into top universities following the admissions exams still rely on private lessons throughout university, paying tutors to go over lecture materials and problem sets.
Eve Sivakul, daughter of Thailand's most famous tutor, Ajarn Ou, recalls the days when her parents' tutoring business operated out of her childhood home. Her parents were ordinary high school teachers but had effective exam-tackling strategies. Students from other schools heard of Eve's parents' fame and requested private tutoring lessons. So, Eve's parents started tutoring on the side, and soon left their high school teaching jobs when the demand for their private lessons soared.
"It was absurd," Ms Sivakul recalls. "Parents lined up outside our building, demanding that we let their children into the lessons. When we turned them down due to classroom capacity, they wouldn't budge. They insisted that we videotape the lessons instead, so that their children could watch them in a separate room."
This was how the tutoring industry took off in Thailand. In response to high demand and even higher compensation, good teachers left public schools and became private tutors. By filming lessons, tutors were no longer confined by teaching capacity. They could now target large audiences with very little cost, reeling in the children of eager parents unhesitant to invest in their children's education.
Yet students still had to physically travel to tutoring schools to watch the filmed lessons, since each video was copyrighted and could be shown only at that tutoring school. And these lessons aren't cheap. A one-subject course at a distinguished tutoring school can cost 3,000 to 8,000 baht -- over three times the tuition fee for an entire semester at a typical public school.
What does this imply for students from low-income households who cannot afford private tutoring? Or for those living in rural areas who cannot commute to Bangkok, where more than half of the country's tutoring schools are located?
There are no easy solutions, but digital education may help bridge the inequality gap in accessing education. Film Kunupakaphun, founder of ed-tech startup Tutora, is leveraging technology to reach students from low-income backgrounds in rural areas.
"Students can upload a picture of their homework on our app, and then a volunteer tutor will give them guidance," said Mr Film. Students from public schools in rural Thailand can use Tutora for free, while students from schools in Bangkok are charged a fee.
Yet increasing access to tutoring only works in the short run. Long-term solutions must push the university admissions process towards a more holistic application process, not one that is heavily skewed towards test scores. Unflattering public perceptions of teaching can be improved by raising compensation for public school teachers, to attract more talented personnel into the teaching workforce.
It's been over a decade since I limped up the stairs of my tutoring school. While my broken leg has long since healed, I cannot say the same for my country's educational woes. Tutoring is but a minor fix to the problem -- a crutch, if I may say so myself.
Tayo Tunyathon Koonprasert is studying for a Master in Public Administration (MPA) at Harvard University.