Nation of followers

I fully agree with Sanitsuda Ekachai in her May 25 article, “How our education sustains dictatorship” which is why our most highly educated elite have been so supportive of the last coup d’etat.

I suggest that core values essential to a vibrant democracy include freedom of expression, tolerance, and the willingness to give a fair hearing to ideas regardless of source (adopted from commencement speech by Michael Bloomberg, Villanova University, 2017).

We have long lacked these core values, as shown by our insistence on precise uniformity in dress for students, unwillingness to give both sides to an issue the equal opportunity to make their case, and forbidding students from calmly questioning what their teachers say. For example, there can be no debate on what police reforms are needed, nor what our education goals should be — yet our governments for the next two decades will be bound to the strategy that the junta is drafting.

As a student at the University of Chicago, I studied under George Stigler and was a lifelong friend of Merton Miller. What impressed me most about these two, who became Nobel laureates, was their humility and their eagerness to engage all and sundry in intellectual discourse, for they knew that peacefully exploring areas of differences was where progress was to be made — and their ideas have changed the world.

We, too, can fully harness our potential if we follow Stigler and Miller and the values above. Instead, we are teaching our students to be obedient followers in an authoritarian society, and this bodes ill for us in competing internationally. BURIN KANTABUTRA