After 13 years of teaching university students in Thailand, I believe the Education Ministry's plan to emphasise morals, history and civic duties misses the essential elements needed to bring change to Thai students' education.
As an American who has taught in American universities and worked in both the high tech sector and the dot.com industry, what I am experiencing with almost all of my Thai students is their serious lack of understanding of scientific progress and how technological innovation is changing the world.
Such changes that bring global effects come from new discoveries in all disciplines. The challenge that emerges is how best to manage the data deluge or big data.
The recent Pluto flyby mission was the latest example of how our perception of planets in our solar system has already changed. Unfortunately, some of Thailand's youth brought ridicule to the country by deriding this achievement with online banter which disrupted the announcement from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa). This was unacceptable on all counts.
I have been watching many attempts by the Ministry of Education over the years to bring change to Thailand's educational system. The National Reform Act of 1999 incorporated an active learning methodology in the classroom to encourage learning that was student-centred rather than teacher-centred.
I have seen the attempt for the 5-billion-baht One Tablet Per Child (OTPC) initiative come and go. The OTPC excited millions of young students with the opportunity to participate with digital technology. Yet the project was mismanaged, wasting a golden opportunity to have digital education take root in Thailand.
Now the Ministry of Education has recalled all the tablets, forcing the students to once again return to a teacher-centric learning environment.
A more recent initiative here is the introduction of the smart classroom, to be rolled out in 18,000 schools, replacing the tablet computer scheme. However, a smart classroom is more technologically intensive than a tablet computer and without a complete understanding of how students learn in an interactive digital classroom, guided by the teacher, this initiative will fail to realise its full potential in helping students learn.
When I see freshman or first-year students enter my classroom, I am astounded that they don't even have the most basic understanding of how a nation state is organised or any grasp of Thailand's relationship to the rest of the world. It is as if other countries did not even exist.
The current effort to give more weight to history, morals and civic duties in national curricula may have value, but it is not addressing the students' core problems: a lack of awareness of rapid developments in the world they are living in, and the future challenges many professions. Given rapid technological change, students may find what they learned in universities may already be obsolete.
The Education Ministry is responsible for students' performance which is now below international standards. Many conferences and symposiums have been held to offer solutions to raise students' achievements. Yet, follow-up work rarely takes place.
The rate of change that is coming with new scientific discoveries in all fields is surpassing our ability to fully comprehend their significance, especially in the sphere of artificial intelligence. The Ministry of Education must learn how to equip students with sufficient knowledge to enter the 21st century which will be necessary to move Thailand into the future.
The students have to be made aware of rapid technological change to prepare themselves to meet future needs. Just by putting 18,000 smart classrooms into schools while continuing to teach content stuck in the past is not going to work. Modern teaching media must be integrated into new classrooms which can demonstrate to students that unless nation states adapt to change, they will fail.
Thailand has a rich base of human resources. Those resources should be nurtured and groomed by combining Thai traditions with modern worldviews while looking ahead to future developments. If not, the system will produce more hackers making fun of scientific progress in other countries, and leave the nation lagging behind the rest of the world.
Willard Van De Bogart is a lecturer/researcher in the Language Institute at Bangkok University. He is currently researching the effectiveness of smart classrooms for learning.