Conclusion. The Need for a Real Educational Reform

1“Neither economics, nor politics, nor civil society exists in a vacuum” (Girling 2002): We are tempted to apply this statement to education to conclude our Occasional Paper. The educational reform launched in 1999 stemmed from a wind of optimism and modernity that wanted to turn its back to authoritarianism and give a voice to civil society and local communities. However, education cannot be considered in isolation from its environment, either economic, political, or cultural, and the missions assigned to the educational reform were tremendous as it aimed at dealing with all of these dimensions at the same time.

2The possibility for educational institutions to develop or implement their own curriculum to suit their needs and resources was a major breakthrough towards community empowerment. However, it was amidst contradictory goals and desires and inappropriately backed up by the administration which launched it. It did not lead to major innovations in terms of educational development as the same people were consulted without giving the opportunity for newcomers to voice their concerns or ideas.

3Adapting state-led education to local communities is also a biased mission right from the beginning because the system wants to reproduce itself and keep the national patterns unchanged. This is especially acute in the situation of hill tribes: Though modern instruction has proved unable to help children either to live well in their local environment or to interact effectively with their lowland counterparts, solutions are hard to find. The involvement of civil society actors, such as NGOs and POs can be seen as an optimistic manner of handling the problems but actually shows the failure of the state in that area and the lack of coordination between all actors.

4As stated, education does not exist in a vacuum and more and more stress has been put on the educational system to train the workers needed by the national economy. In that sense, the government has emphasized the role of technical education and cooperative programmes. However, by doing so, politicians have imported concepts and programmes from abroad, such as “clusters” or “dual education”. Though this policy borrowing was apparently meant to quickly solve the problems Thailand was faced with, leading to fuzzy situations, such as those presented in Chapter 4 and 5. As the authors pointed out, it questions the rationale behind all of these programmes, and the attempts made to solve the problems sound more populist than genuinely geared towards economic and social development.

5The Thai modern education system was maybe historically efficient for nation-building and basic knowledge inculcating, but has not succeeded in answering the needs raised by a knowledge-based society. Mentalities are slow to change between the respect of traditions and the requirement of good behaviour. All of this does not facilitate innovation or changes. One example was presented with the case of implementing co-op education in universities.

6Co-op programmes are a totally new way of understanding education as it requires full participation and collaboration of private companies, different administrations, and educational institutions. Educators need to be openminded, meaning ready to accept and put in practice alternative ways of educating people. Courses should be dynamic and oriented to the audience, to entice students to be full and active actors of the knowledge transmission process. Moreover, educators are meant to be supervisors, and this is also totally new to them. However, the training of teachers, either initial or in service, does not seem able to catch up with these changes and needs. So called co-op programmes can be launched but if nothing is done to implement them as such, they will remain empty shells and the outcomes will not be those expected, in terms of educational achievement or economic upgrading.

7The reform attempted since 1999 was very wide indeed, taking into account that this Occasional Paper has not dealt with other important dimensions, such as the autonomy of public universities, the reshuffling of the Ministry of Education or the enforcement of quality assurance into educational institutions. As such, the reform was far too large to be achieved, and relied on imported recipes that were not adequately grasped. The very rationales behind them should have been analysed, together with the environment they originated from, before even thinking of incorporating them into domestic policies. Failure to do so has led to an educational system that is still facing the same challenges as 10 years ago, if not more or worse. By avoiding in-depth introspection and being unable to cure the roots of the illnesses, the situation has not changed for the better, while at the same time Thailand has faced more and more issues, either economically or politically. It is now time to embrace a real educational reform at a feasible scale.