Thailand is part of the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN), which also has an economic group, the ASEAN Economic Community
(AEC), both of which will theoretically mean changes for Thailand’s education
and economic systems officially beginning in 2015 (as I understand it), but
which changes have in effect already begun.
One aspect of these changes has to do with what I and my fellow PC
teaching volunteers are doing here and how we are supposed to align our work
with the goals of the Thai government, most specifically the Ministry of
Education. But rather than tackle this
vast and largely abstract and administrative policy issue, I am going to try
and describe one specific and concrete manifestation of it, namely, (and please
excuse the very rough translation) “The Implementation Seminar Program for
Dream Schools,” which was a five-day program on school improvement focused
largely on the Buddhist aspects of Thai culture, from which I just returned.
I attended the program along with the entire teaching staff
of my school, which includes kindergarden through grade 9. It was held in a resort in Rayong province,
right on the beach in tantalizing view of Ko Samet (which I have yet to visit,
but about which I dropped several hints to my colleagues). I was told that this is the first program of
its kind and that there were 50 sites around the country that were virtually
attending it (as we were, which I’ll explain shortly). Before anyone gets too jealous about the
venue, let me explain that very generally what the program consisted of was
meditation sessions, beginning at 5AM, interspersed throughout a series of
1.5-3 hour talks streamed in from Bangkok, which lasted until 9:30 or 10:00PM
each day. The talks were by Buddhist
monks and education specialists of various sorts, who all had a remarkable
ability to speak without pausing (and often without any visible notes) for
hours at a stretch.
Although my understanding was greatly hindered by my limited
Thai (I was generally able to grasp that
the speakers were talking about something that teachers and/or students in
Thailand do or should do, but beyond that it was often pretty sketchy) one of
my co-teachers made a valiant effort to fill in some of the details for
me. Often the topics were very specific
aspects of Thai-Buddhist culture, e.g. cleanliness, politeness, rituals and
precepts, respect, etc. One talk dealt
with the benefits of meditation. Another
discussed ideal teaching methods. One
talk went into rather excruciating detail about how a Thai house, and by
extension, a school should be organized and maintained. All of the talks
exhorted the teachers to be models for their students, and to teach them to be
good people, not just good students.
Often comparisons would be made between Thailand and other
countries, e.g. America, Germany, Korea, and Japan, and usually to Thailand’s
disadvantage. Today’s comparisons were
all about Japan and how Japanese children were trained for perseverance from an
early age, how they could bathe and dress themselves by the age of 3, how they
could already read and write full paragraphs by age of 4, etc. There were also pictures of Japanese school
buses and school food, which were fun and cute.
The buses were painted (and shaped) like animals or anime characters;
the food was made into shapes or faces. Disparaging remarks were made about Kao Tom (a boiled rice dish).
All in all it was both fascinating and tedious by turns, and
also exhausting, especially as the days of 11PM bed and 4AM rising time wore
on. What was most fascinating to me was
how the entire program seemed like a symptom of anxiety about the prospective
loss of cultural identity threatened by membership in ASEAN and the AEC. Although several of the presentations implied
as much, only one explicitly addressed potential conflicts and/or problems,
specifically religious, and arising from relationships (both individual and
collective) between Thais and people from other countries. This issue was also reflected in an
ambivalence around the anxiety about competing economically with other AEC
countries, in one talk humorously expressed through a comparison of bathrooms
in Thailand and Singapore.
I also found it interesting that a clear emphasis was placed
on teachers’ responsibility for the transmission of both traditional Thai
culture and new ways of thinking and doing things, both by way of setting the
example (intellectual, as well as moral, spiritual, and practical) for students,
and through other methods of pedagogical engagement. This emphasis seemed at odds with the actual
behavior of many of the teachers at the program, who showed up halfway into the
first morning meditation or skipped it entirely; wandered in and out of the
talks, and when present, would often sleep or talk to their neighbors.
Although I’ve noticed this kind of inattention in many other
contexts, apparently this is not how every one of these programs went. They’ve been going on for a few weeks, and I’m
not sure how long they will continue, but my host mom went to a different one a
week ago and reported to me that it was markedly different. Morning meditation started at 5AM sharp and
by a quarter ‘til all the seats were filled.
She said that during the talks you could hear a pin drop and that people
never left the room. I asked her what
she thought the difference was between the people at her program and the ones
at mine, whether for instance it was a difference in school culture, but she
seemed to think it was just a matter of idiosyncratic differences in people’s
level of interest in such things. I’ll
chalk that up to my inability to express myself and ask follow up questions in
Thai, but I hope as I spend more time here and talk to more teachers, I can
come to a deeper understanding of how Thailand’s entry into ASEAN and the AEC
are affecting its culture and most specifically how this is manifested in the
lives of teachers and students alike.
No comments:
Post a Comment