Education mafia

Re: “Good start to level learning,” (Editorial, Oct 12).

The fact is that in Thailand students from rich families tend to get the lion’s share of education and employment opportunities in the country. It is solely the fault of the Thai government to allow the international education mafia to set

up their institutions squeezing billions of baht from families and send their children for further exploitation in the UK, US and Australia. There should be a cap on this mafia which is partly responsible for creating the disparities and cracks in the Thai educational system from the top to the bottom. These so-called “elite” institutions have no interest in serving the Thai middle class. The proliferation of international sweatshops combined with the government’s misguided policies has resulted in widening the education gap. Yes, there are exceptions. Catholic institutions in Thailand have provided quality education to the disfranchised and poor people in Thailand for a century.

The Thai educational system must be decentralised and the government agencies should provide guidelines with a core curriculum across the country with the freedom to experiment with the electives, as needed. The traditional onesize-fits-all type of top-down approach is not working. Unless, more efforts are put into cultivating a healthy, equitable, and well-rounded autonomous educational system that is accessible to all students, regardless of the family income, the ordinary Thais will remain on the fringes. There is no need to copy the Finnish or UK model of education. There is a very successful education model of human resource development right in our neighbourhood — the Singapore model. KULDEEP NAGI