The paradoxes of Thai education
Professor Gerald W Fry of the University of Minnesota has been one of the most monumental academics who has tried to understand the complexity of Thai education for the past seven decades. A new 744-page book that he edited, Education in Thailand: An Old Elephant in Search of a New Mahout, could easily become the new encyclopaedia of Thai education. The authors include Her Royal Highest Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn and other renowned educators. Rattana Lao spoke to Prof Fry about the book project and Thai education.
How did you bring diverse groups of authors with various perspectives on Thai education together to complete this project?
I have been working nearly seven decades in Thailand. That is a long time. In the course of all those years, I have known Thai people from so many institutions: Mahidol, Kasetsart, Thammasat and Srinakharinwirot. I had a lot of social capital to draw from. Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn has also contributed two chapters in this book. Yes, HRH wrote two wonderful chapters. She had conducted a special seminar for Stanford University on the history of Thai education, so I thought she would be the perfect person to write the introductory chapter, “History and Development of Thai Education”. Using her depth of knowledge on Bali-Sanskrit, she described the origin of the word “Suksa”, which means “capable”. She wrote another chapter called “Education of the Disadvantaged”, where HRH focused on the 15 most disadvantaged groups in Thailand. This is an updated work from her previous publication with Unesco.
With 31 authors and 27 chapters, what is the main argument that this book is making about Thai education?
These authors identified the major problems and paradoxes coming out of Thai education. While most of the writing on the topic is extremely polarised, with some saying everything is bad and some saying everything is rosy, this book is really balanced. We recognised the good things such as the happiness of Thai students, quantitative expansion of basic education and the massification of higher education. The problems are quality and inequality. The educational paradox is that Thailand spends a lot of money on education but the educational achievements do not live up to the investment. The outcomes are very disappointing.
Why is that the case? What went wrong?
Dr Siriluksana Khomman’s chapter explains how a lot of money going into Thai education does not improve the quality of the education. Most money is spent on infrastructure, making beautiful buildings or swimming pools. Concrete things are visible but they are not necessary useful.
Can you elaborate more on the issue of quality? Thailand has been driven to achieve better quality through various mechanisms of quality indicators, quality assurance and quality assessment. Do these measurements reflect the reality of the system? The famous Einstein quotation, “We measure what we can, not what is important”, means it is very difficult to assess quality. In chapter 14, for the first time, we came up with indexes about the quality of education for each province of Thailand based on a lot of empirical data. We recognised that the current measures of education are limited and flawed. We cannot measure creativity and we cannot measure critical thinking or problem-solving. Thailand talks a lot about establishing more research universities. Where are we and how far are we from this?
Thailand is far behind. This is due to the overall English skills. The English of most Thai researchers is not strong enough to publish in international journals. Research skills are limited. There is no adequate methodology or theoretical framework. We need to provide more training for methodology. But not all researchers are bad in Thailand. I attended the Research Expo and witnessed growing numbers of high-quality applied research. Even Rajabhat universities are doing applied research studies that make a difference.
What are the common factors that make some schools excel?
There are pockets of excellence because of dynamic and visionary leadership. The chapter by Ajarn Prapapat Niyom on alternative education also shows some of these successful cases. That’s hard to scale up. The challenge of improving leadership in schools is very difficult because school leaders are chasing “administrative butterflies” who want to move up in their careers instead of improving the classroom. The key to successful education is the time spent on classroom improvement.
How do we improve the quality of education to ensure an equitable society?
We have to address the small schools problem. So much money has been spent and there are not enough teachers. Teachers must be able to teach multiple grades. The chapter by Dr Dilaka Lathapipat from the World Bank exemplifies this. Closing down small schools is politically impossible because they are at the heart of communities. However, consolidating some is an option. Law and policy are just papers. Thai educational law has many good ideas but those ideas have not yet been implemented. This includes project-based learning and a child-centred approach. The chapter by Dr Phillip Hallinger shows that child-centred learning is not the norm in Thailand.