Created By Tee

Thailand Educational Problem

December 4th, 2005

I’m really worried about Thailand Education now. The real problem is not about the kid nor the official curriculum; it’s about how students were taught. If you are not Thai, the curriculum in Thailand is almost fixed. It’s fixed for main subjects scienes, math, social science and languages. Student studied way way way too hard. Can you imagine a school in which school starts at 8.30 and ends at 4.30 every single day?

Students in Thailand are like flower pots where empty teachers throwing in seeds. Teachers throwing in seed and expect them to have seeds. Some of them have holes; so, they cannot carry much. They could not carry much seed. Some of them do not have any holes; they have all the seeds teachers expected. Many thought that this is a perfect idea of education. What happen when students could not hold seeds? Teacher blame at students to have “holes”. This is silly. If you were to know that that flower pot have holes why do not you throw your seeds avoiding the hole?

Anyway, I am not only going to blame the teachers of this failure. The one in my mind is to think of students as flower pot but with soil in it. Some of them have soil that you can grow veggie. Some of them have soil that you can grow flowers. Some of them have soil that you can grow various kind of plants. I believe that none of them have soil that you cannot grow anything on it. And the teachers’ job is to experimenting on what kind of plant grow on which flower pot. And throw the right kind of seed in to those pot. The teachers should not expect them to have the seed; teachers should expect them to grow not just to have a seed.

Thailand loses many great soil due to the system. Thailand taught math as if it were a plug and chuck subject(pluging in numbers into the formula not proving). Thailand taught physics as if it were another plug and chuck subject. Thailand taught biology and chemistry as if they were a memorizing subject not an experimenting subject. Thailand taught religion(Buddism) and ask what the name of Buddha’s first student is. I do not know if those who made the curriculum know the heart, the purpose of those subjects or not. The heart of math is to reason not to do what I shall call symbolic manipulation. The heart of physics is to build up a model thereby understanding the nature and being able to predict stuff. The heart of biology and chemistry is not to memorize weird names. Knowing more of those weird names does not show any of your intellectual ability. The heart of biology and chemistry is to know how to design and conduct a smart experiment. Like the heart of computer science is not to know many algorithms nor many programming languages nor memorizing those weird API’s. It is to be able to understand algorithms which one is faster and to come up with a better one.

Thai government should see this problem and consider it seriously. This flaw has serious effect in long term. Please, I beg, take care of this problem.

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