The content in this page ("Future Ignorance" by Harrison George) is not produced by Prachatai staff. Prachatai merely provides a platform, and the opinions stated here do not necessarily reflect those of Prachatai.

Future Ignorance

Three decades ago, some Australian outfit produced a documentary about schoolboys in Thailand. It was one of those ‘follow them around with a camera' efforts, and, without bothering with an explanatory soundtrack, it focussed on 3 Bangkok kids, each from a different social class.

 

There was the son of a military officer. Nice house, if a bit cramped, Mum stayed at home but the school uniform was ironed by a maid and the journey to school was in a car chauffeured by a conscript. This boy went to a recognizable government school, one of those known to be better than its equals.

 

The second boy went to a nondescript temple school, by bus, from his nondescript Chinese shop house, where the entire family worked from dawn to bedtime and the TV was on for even longer.

 

The third schoolboy didn't actually go to school. He lived in a slum, brushed his teeth at a standpipe round the corner and peddled some kind of khanom from a tray he carried on his head.

 

This, 30 years ago, was supposed to be upper-, middle- and lower-class Bangkok.

 

It was never a scientific distinction and totally bemused some of the (upper-class) Thai students I showed it to. They complained that the title mentioned 3 kids, but they saw only 2. The shop house kid and the slum kid had, from their privileged perspective, fused into one indistinguishable ‘other'.

 

How things have changed.

 

The poor of course, are still with us. But there is something of a crisis facing the education of the privileged classes.

 

You are probably most familiar with the aspect of this problem that surfaces on the letters to the editor page of the local press. A steady stream of foreign school teachers declares themselves shocked at the nonexistent standards at the institutions where they are teaching. Their major beef has to do with the way students are promoted to the next grade, no matter how incompetent their exam results prove them to be.

 

Note, first, just how many complaints there are. There are many more foreigners in the state education system than there used to be, and the private education system, which always had a few, is many times the size it was. And if a school can boast foreign teachers, then that school, ipso facto, becomes more prestigious and more capable of attracting the children of affluent parents.

 

Now the indiscriminate promotion of students from one grade to the next, based on no more demanding qualification that they keep breathing, is one that pervades the entire system. And that of many other countries.

 

But what is particular to the ‘good' schools educating the offspring of well-heeled Thai families is another problem altogether. And a more troubling one.

 

And this is a problem of discipline. Not the discipline problem that schools have traditionally had, of smoking behind the bicycle sheds, being rowdy at every opportunity and scratching obscenities on the paintwork of the headmaster's Toyota. But a problem of just not being bothered.

 

They are not normally disruptive in class. They're just non-cooperative. They simply won't do the assigned work.

 

In fact, ‘won't' may be overstating the case. There doesn't seem to be much will in it at all. They just don't do it. Homework is for that shrinking fraction that somehow still subscribes to the virtues of diligence and duty. The rest of them couldn't give a left-handed and turn up next morning with nothing in their exercise books and not even a ‘dog-ate-my-homework' excuse.

 

I am told that the most of them are nice kids, and are no threat to the well-being of anyone but themselves. And in the right circumstances, such as 18-hour all-night sessions of Lineage II, they can show admirable perseverance.

 

But because they are ‘nice' children from ‘nice' families, who are either coughing up private school fees or public school tea-money, teachers are discouraged from taking the problem to the parents. On the odd occasion when this does happen, it seems that the parents are in the same despair and confusion as the teachers. 8-years-olds don't do as they are told and there is nothing that Mummy and Daddy seem to be able to do about it.

 

Thai society has, for a variety of reasons, done a fairly poor job of educating its citizens in the past. Today, with crises of climate change, capitalism and democratic legitimacy darkening the horizon, there is a need for a well-educated citizenry. Especially that bit of it whose inherited power and prestige gives them the biggest say.

 

It looks like we're not going to get it.

 

 About author:  Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).

And if you believe any of those stories, you might believe his columns.

 

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