STELLAR RANKINGS ON
BOTH THE GLOBAL AND
REGIONAL STAGE IN OVERALL
EDUCATIONAL INDICATORS,
THAILAND HAS IT'S WORK CUT
OUT AHEAD OF THE LAUNCH
OF THE ASEAN ECONOMIC
COMMUNITY NEXT YEAR
The results are in and they ain't pretty. According to the World Economic Forum's "Global Competitiveness Report 2013-2014," Thailand ranks at a dismal 8th place in the 10 members ASEAN grouping when comes to its educational systems suitability for meeting the needs of a competitive economy. The Kingdom finished even below its impoverished northern neighbour, Laos, and just above Cambodia.
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Globally, the situation looks bleaker still. In the quality of its
primary education the country ranks - steady yourself at place 86
out of 148 countries. The overall ranking of Thailand's educational
system also places it squarely in mid-table, at 78th place out of the
same 148 nations surveyed. Meanwhile, according to the most recent
scores of to Programme for international Student Assessment (PISA),
Thailand is sitting pretty in the bottom 25 percent - at 50th place out
of 65 countries surveyed. Tne country's then education minister
Chaturon Chaisaeng declared himself "stunned" at the results.
Perhaps he
should not have been. The Kingdom's shortcomings in almost all areas of
education are nothing new. In 2010, for instance, Thailand ranked 116th out of 163 countries on the global charts for the Test of English as a
Foreign Language (TOEFL), landing among the bottom five countries
even in Asia together with Vietnam, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and
Timor-Leste (formerly East Timor). In general, Thai students did poorly
equally on speaking, listening, writing and reading.
In response to the Kingdom's poor standings, Sornpong Jitradab, an
assistant professor at Chulalongkorn University, pointed at widespread
functional illiteracy among children, a problem that has plagued the
country for decades. Yet, while neighbouring countries, most of which
lag behind Thailand in economic development, have managed to make
inroads in education, Sompong said, Thailand has largely been stuck in a
rut.
"Over the past four or five years, teams from other ASEAN
countries have come to Thailand to look at how the education sector
can be improved, and they've managed to deliver results. Yet Thailand
is unable to Solve its (own) educational problems," he lamented. marknemesis.
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Long
story short: Thailand has one of the worst educational systems in the
developing world and its educational achievements have little to
recommend them even in Southeast Asia. The education minister who
succeeded Sompong, Jaturon Chaisaeng, highlighted an "urgent need"
to improve the quality of the country's education ahead of the launch
next year of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), an EU-style
initiative that seeks to boost the regions competitiveness on the
global stage through closer collaboration in a variety of endeavors,
with education among them.
The government has promised to expedite
eight areas of development, including school reform, teacher training
reform, improvement in vocational education, and a more equitable
distribution of learning opportunities across the country.
Such
reforms are certainly much needed. Last July, the United Nations
Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) urged Thailand to upgrade
its curricula, the better to enable students to compete both at
global job markets and in the AEC region, with its aggregate population
of 580 million people, a large majority of whom are young and
ambitious with dreams of social mobility.
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