When comparing eight of the countries that are a part of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Thailand ranks eighth. The two countries that were not included were Laos and Burma, which are widely regarded as low performing. That means that children in Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, the Philippines, Cambodia and Vietnam were more proficient on the test. And Education Ministry officials are “stunned.” However, an honest look at the Thai education system reveals lots of room for improvement.
I’m not a huge proponent of standardized testing, but the last quote is rather telling: “The Pisa results clearly shows Thai children are not good at thinking.” And it goes beyond Thai children; I would say that while Thai adults did not take the Pisa test, they also would not do very well because they also are not good at thinking. By that, it is meant that Thai people, children and adults, lack critical thinking skills.
Rote Memorization as Learning
I had this conversation with one of my co-teachers last week. There is a great emphasis in the Thai education system on memorization. At my school, during the daily morning assembly, they raise the flag, sing the national anthem and say a Buddhist chant. Then, some students get up on stage in front of the whole school to recite their multiplication tables. This is not a special thing that happens after they are taught to show off what they learned; this is something that happens every single day.
At the end of each of my classes, I have the students line up and they have to answer a prompt using the sentence frame or vocabulary that was taught during the lesson and that they just played some sort of game for them to practice saying it aloud.
There are some times that they struggle with finding the word, so I will try to prompt them by saying the first sound of the word they are looking for. They will look me in the eye and confidently repeat the sound that I just made and move through the rest of the sentence as if that noise was what I was looking for. The critical thinking steps of, that isn’t a word or something we practiced, but it sounds kind of like something we did, are not practiced. What is practiced and encouraged here is obeying and submitting to the complete authority of the teacher. Repeat and memorize what the teacher says and you will achieve.
Barriers to Introducing Critical Thinking
So when my co-teacher comes to me to ask for help with her friend’s homework for a university course, and I ask her probing questions, like “What do you think?” Her internal response, as she explained to me in our conversation last week, is “Why are you asking me questions? I don’t know. Just tell me the answer!”
Or when I have my other co-teacher observe me teaching grades 1-3 for two weeks, and I ask her, “What did you notice me do when I was teaching? What is something that I did that you didn’t do? What was it that I did that kept the students interested?” She just tells me the lesson plan outline that we went through just before I asked those questions.
So while I taught kindergartners in the States words like “schema” and “metacognition” and first graders “inference” and they could tell me what they meant and show me that they could do them, I’m not even sure if Thai even has these words.
One of my co-teachers gets it. She’s on board. She knows that it’s something that she doesn’t know how to do and she wants to learn how and to teach the students how to as well. And I believe that is truly what my program, Teacher Collaboration and Community Service, is about. It’s hard, but we’re getting there. And it’s amazing to watch.
officialtravelnews June 11, 2016
As I always say, Thai are good as drinking friends or any other activity when brain is not needed, but they are the worst student or coworkers. And what is really incredible is that nothing has changed during the last 20 years…
Christine June 11, 2016
I wrote this post pretty early on during my time in Thailand, and while I’d say that the facts remain true, I’ve come to a better understanding of the why. Critical thinking is pretty much antithetical to most, if not all, of the cultural values that keep the society going and together. Because of greng jai and the importance of maintaining face, critical thinking just isn’t going to be accepted. If someone, particularly someone lower in status is constantly asking why, and thinking of ways to improve, it is only going to break co-workers’s faces, and cause a lot of social strife for everyone involved. It’s frustrating to see and hear the Thai people and institutions to proclaim goals, that the easiest route to would involve learning and using critical thinking skills, but Western concepts of this just are not going to fit in their cultural framework, which is why even after 20 years things haven’t changed. It’s going to take someone(s) with native cultural competency of Thai culture and a deep understanding of critical thinking to introduce any changes. And I see it happening in a few places and in small ways, but it’s something that is going to take many generations to address. And I sincerely hope it does happen at the expense of Thai culture and values.