I have proposed this before why can’t we have live TV programs that brings all stakeholders in the current conflict (like many aired by the ABC and SBS in Australia), TRT/PPP, UDD, PAD, the opposition, the military etc…etc… to discuss democracy, checks and balances, the rule of law, conflicts of interests, corruption, human rights etc. – and use the 1997 Constitution as the reference for what went wrong. I think that would be highly informative and educative at a societal level.

Contrary to Thaitaff and Khun Manning, I don’t think it is about the narrow Thai mentality (as this applies anywhere) – but rather because of a lack of facilited public forums for difference of opinions to be aired and debated.

Completely agree, Thailand provides an opportunity to think outside the box of so-called “critical thinking.”

So-called “critical thinking” skills can be applied in a practical small business context, for instance, formulating a winning business plan for a small magazine or a bakery. More opportunities and unoccupied niches for small businesses here. I designed a project-based curriculum for second year business English students at a university and is the focus for our little website at the Bangkok Post:

http://www.readbangkokpost.com/business/entrepreneurs_and_business_plans/

Not exactly studying Plato or Socrates, but some hard thinking and detailed research (marketing surveys, focus groups, surveys of the existing competition) can lead to some insights about the human context and business opportunities that surround you.

European style vocational training seems to be much more in a critical thinking vein. One of my neighbors in Maesai was trained as a baker in the Netherlands and now travels around Asia selling ready mixed bread dough material and has also experimented with a lot of little bakery projects including hamburger buns to local hotels and restaurants. Somewhere along the way he added MBA skills to the vocational skills that he began with, all by himself. More provision needs to be made for this sort of self-education like what the Thailand Creative and Design Center on the top of the Emporium tries to do for design.

It’s a good thing Thailand has a thriving private educational sector with international schools and universities. The public educational sector tends to be a little moribund and inflexible. Instead of following the well-charted best practices of other Asian countries such as Korea and Japan, new draconian regulations suddenly pop out from nowhere (actually the interim NLA). Andrew Walker was waxing how his PhD was the ultimate educational credential, well he would not qualify to be an English teacher in Thailand now, for which you need specifically a bachelors degree in education, no more, not less, even in a university, altough regulations like have a tendency to be ignored.

It is so intractably placed into Thai culture that it is the single largest obstacle to Thailands development in the coming generations. But then a country that can’t tolerate basic questioning of its institutions in a public environment isn’t holding up a very good example to its youth.

The day that Thai society realises that to allow real public discourse makes its society stronger, Thailand society will be able to throw off the blindfold of ignorance.

Educators worry over lack of quality control
Many institutes not doing a good job

SIRIKUL BUNNAG
The number of students may have crossed the two million mark, but the news does not sound good for regulators of tertiary education who were already fretting about the poor quality.
Each year the country’s high schools together produce about 700,000 graduates, of which about 70% go on to pursue further studies in public or private universities.
Over two million of them are now pursuing diplomas, a bachelor’s degree or higher university education.
The number of students has doubled and the number of courses has increased 10-fold over the last decade.
The Higher Education Commission (HEC), however, sees the jump in quantity as a looming danger for the education system.
“The increase is too fast-paced. It seems as if all the Mathayom 6 (grade 12) students were fit to continue their university studies, as their performance was not being taken into account,” Higher Education Commission secretary-general Sumate Yamnoon admitted.

He pointed out that in general the O-Net and A-Net scores of students from Mathayom 4 to 6 levels were well below average in all subjects. The poor results should be taken as a warning by educators that students needed to be better prepared for undergraduate degrees.
“Our process to screen students for higher education is problematic,” Mr Sumate said.
The students alone should not be blamed for the poor scores, as easy opportunities presented by both public and private colleges and universities were also contributing to the problem.
Over the past six years, the number of courses on offer has jumped from 235 to over 2,000 . But this was not matched by the quantity of lecturers.
“The number of lecturers did not increase. In fact, it was the other way round, as universities have a policy of cutting down their personnel,” Mr Sumate said.
Instead of hiring full-time lecturers, most universities now prefer part-timers, because no extra benefits are involved.
The problem was serious at the Rajabhat and Rajamangala universities. Before being upgraded to universities in 2003, the two institutes offered only graduate diplomas and undergraduate degrees, he said.
“The HEC is trying its best to improve the quality of lecturers by making 1,000 scholarships available each year for doctorate degrees.
“But no one from Rajabhat and Rajamangala has so far qualified for them because their GPA at the undergraduate level is below 3.00,” he said.
Somwung Pitiyanuwat, director of the Office for National Education Standards and Quality Assessment (ONESQA), agrees with him.
The agency’s own evaluation had found that many universities were employing lecturers whose grade point average was 2.5 or lower.
That was not acceptable in the past when the GPA of at least 3.0 was needed by those wanting to become university dons, he said.
It was probably because university lecturers began to enjoy “too much freedom”, he said, as there was no mechanism to assess their teaching standards.
The HEC had issued warnings to colleges and universities whose courses, lecturers, tests and evaluations it found were not up to standard.
Only some have bothered to make improvements, it said.
The end result is that degrees handed out by these institutes are not recognised, he said.
One such institute which made the headlines was Srisophon College in Nakhon Si Thammarat last year, where 12 of the students were unable to receive their degree certificates after the standards office found the Computers for Business course at the private university was below par.
Five or six programmes at other colleges and universities have also been rejected, Mr Sumate said. Many students sued their universities after failing to get their professional certificates to pursue their careers as a result of the substandard courses.
As the agency is directly responsible for all forms of education beyond the high school level, the commission cannot afford to turn a blind eye to the existing flaws.
Efforts on quality control have been inadequate, he said.
Among the stricter new measures on quality control to be introduced by the HEC by 2010 would be a requirement that all the available courses at private and public universities be accredited before they are offered to students.
The HEC now only monitors the programmes run by private colleges and universities, because all courses at state universities have to be approved by the university council first before they are introduced.
Public universities will no longer be left untouched under the new plan. “Universities, private or public, should be evaluated by the same bodies,” he said.
One reason behind the low quality of undergraduates is a commercial drive by universities.
They want money from students and that could be another reason why many of them are using shopping centres as their branches, Mr Somwung said.
“Universities in other countries earn most of their revenue from research and training projects. The only source of income from education is to charge non-resident students a higher tuition fees,” he said.
Thai universities were doing just the opposite, because students were their main source of income, even if the quality had to be sacrificed.
“Funds from the government to support them were insufficient,” he added.
The ONESQA has estimated that no more than 10 universities in the country, all of them public, have solid financial backing to stand on their own feet by generating revenue from their assets, including property and human resources.
“If they are not offered adequate financial support, there is no way you will see an end to low-quality universities in the country as they have to fight for their survival,” Mr Somwung said.Public universities must be strictly controlled by the university council. Politicians had interfered with their management for a long time until the present constitution banned them from sitting on the council.
The ONESQA will assess all off-campus programmes for bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees run by universities in 2008 and will reject them if they are found substandard.
The agency says more than 100 of them are being targeted, including a university in the eastern provinces which has only 3,000 students, but has opened 28 learning centres by claiming that it had more than 10,000 students.
The ONESQA refused to name the university.

My own thoughts are that the frustrations of foreign teachers in Thailand arise due to their lack of understanding of Thai students neeeds to deal with the Thai cultural perceptions of ’saving face” , the need to both maintain ‘face’ for themselves and to protect ‘face’ of others, most particularly the need to protect the ‘face’ of their teachers and achaans by never questioning them. Thus both sides, teachers and students, are most comfortable with rote instruction, a pedagogical methodolgy undervalued in the western world and overworked in Asia. For those interested, I have found that the best academic description of ‘face’ in Thailand to be in Neils Muldar’s original work Everyday Life in Thailand: An Interpretation. For many of us Farangs navigating through Thai society some 20 years ago, this was our survival guide. As for teaching in Thailand, I found that as the teacher, I needed to build the bridge that would clear the path of the ‘face’ saving issues and allow the student to express themselves openly, something I was often able to do so over time on an individual basis, but alas, never at the classroom level. It was frustrating indeed.

Now the concept of ‘face’ is not unique to Thailand, and the Thai education system does suffer from other afflictions. Clearly the Bangkok elite has little desire to share knowledge and thus share power with the Thai masses and thus education has been given short shrift in funding. (Dare I say that if there is any racism, it is that of the institutional Sino-Thai racism against the rural Tai masses ) And then there is the somewhat related issue of corruption within the education system where meritocracy is often thrown out and replaced with purchased seats spanning all levels of the education system from kindergarten up through the most prestigious universities.

Meanwhile, here in the US, we are unintentionally assimilating towards a Thai education system with a test focused system that similarly stifles creativity within the classroom, both from the teachers and from the students. And judging from my nieces who have recently entered the corporate world, the concept of ’saving face’ seems to be entering that sphere as well as they describe a world where little gets done day to day out of fear of rocking the boat from their little cubicles.