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A Hairy Tale

So the Thai education system has earned itself some international publicity of the exactly the kind the Ministry of Education doesn’t want.

Thomas Fuller of the New York Times got insideNawaminthrachinuthit Triam Udomsewuksa Pattanakarn inPaknam to produce an article ‘In Thailand’s Schools, Vestiges of Military Rule’

Now this is not some out-of-the-ball-park school notorious for its egregious authoritarian habits.  This school is a spin-off from Triam Udomsuksa Pattanakarn, which itself started life as a branch of the illustrious Triam Udomsuksa school (or ‘Preparation for Higher Education’ school) that nestles close to the bosom of Chulalongkorn University, which is the higher education for which its pupils are expected to prepare.  

Within the carefully crafted hierarchy of quality among supposedly equal opportunity state schools, it is close to the top.  And Fuller’s article points to the militaristic, elitist, anti-education fraud that it is.

The school certainly has the cachet that upwardly mobile parents want for their children, but from the way the school administration views the task of education, it appears to be disappointingly bog standard.

Fuller’s article gives full rein to Vice Principal Arun Wanpen, a teacher who sincerely believes in what he is doing and who is therefore all the more danger to the minds of the children inhis charge.

He is a disciplinarian of the old school.  The article is based on a visit at the beginning of the school year when the most important school subject is hair care.  Not teaching it.  Doing it.  Forcibly.  

Male students were getting sheered and girls who’d gone in for tinted highlights during the school break were getting them re-dyed back to black.  

And it is hard to know which is the more dispiriting, the quasi-religious zeal shown by the teachers-cum-barbers in their enforcement of uniformity, or the compliant passivity of the students being shorn and blackened.

Vice Principal Arun views the issue of discipline through a disturbing parallel.  “The military needs guns; teachers need sticks,” he says.  Right.  

Now the reason the military needs guns is because its job is supposed to be defending the motherland against armed enemies, foreign and domestic (overwhelmingly the latter in the case of Thailand).  So teachers need sticks because students are their enemy?  

By the way, these are sticks in an education system where corporal punishment was banned some years ago.  What doesthe school use them for?  

And the armed forces are armed because the other lot is also armed.  What weapons do the students ofNawaminthrachinuthit Triam Udomsuksa Pattanakarn carry into the classrooms?

Well it seems that they have one.  A tiny group, led by a student who calls himself Frank (and I have the suspicion that this nickname wasn’t chosen at random) is running a sort of Campaign for Real Education.  Truly radical ideas, like questioning the mechanistic imposition of conformity on students, something Vice Principal Arun is wholeheartedly for: “At a fundamental level, students should have the same appearance,” he says.

And this precocious upstart (who will be demanding the freedom to think next, you just watch) has an unlikely ally at the top of the pyramid.  Minister of Education PhongthepThepkanjana, himself a product of Triam Udomsuksa, wants to lessen the rote memorization that runs through all Thai education. This laborious ingestion of facts,useful or not, correct or not, us what turns naturally inquisitive Prathom 1 students into postgraduates who for the life of them can’t think up a thesis topic, so successfully has any desire to learn been knocked out their heads.  Quite literally knocked out ifVice Principal Arun and his stick had their way

Minister Pongthep is also worried about all this barbering that effectively delays the start of the school year.  He has proposed to the Cabinet a relaxation of the rules on hair length.  Now even if the Cabinet, stuffed as it is with liberal-minded free-thinkers ha ha, passes this revolutionary idea, there is no guarantee it will in fact be implemented.

Vice Principal Arun is not in favour.  “If the government launches new policies, we will look at them and decide which ones are appropriate for us.”

What Vice Principal Arun does to his students’ hair would be criminal assault in many societies.  What he is doing to their heads is a national disaster that is reflected in the abysmal performance of the Thai education system despite the oodles of budget being thrown at it.  

His belligerent disobedience to government policy, should it ever materialize, epitomizes what the hidden Thai education curriculum teaches its students about discipline.  Vice Principal Arun is saying that discipline is what I impose on you, not what anyone can impose on me.

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