The protest by Bodindecha students and their parents urging the school to take previously rejected students into classes illustrates a major flaw in the education system. The students and parents have been desperately trying to get accepted at this well-recognized school because of the wider disparity in the quality of our schools.
As of press time, there were reports that the school had accepted an additional 20 students and planned to assist parents of the remaining rejected students to find suitable schools nearby.
But this episode at Bodindecha School is unlikely to be the last of its kind. In fact, students who have been rejected from other well-regarded schools are reportedly planning to make the same kind of protest. After all, what has happened at Bodindecha is not an isolated case. Every year when the new semester commences, there are scenes of students crying because they’d been rejected by their school of choice. This is a sad reality check for students about the lesson of the survival of the fittest.
Like any public secondary school, Bodindecha will allocate only 80 percent of its places to students who have graduated from lower secondary schools. Bodindecha officials explain that it cannot take in all the students who want to attend due to Education Ministry ratio requirements. The ministry says this is in line with its plan to accept academically excellent students from other lower secondary schools, as well as to encourage students to look at other options, such as continuing their studies in technical college or vocational school.
The Bodindecha protest has illustrated the challenges facing the Thai education system. First, the issue facing students is not a shortage of schools, but disparity in the quality of teaching. That is why students who were rejected by Bodindecha rejected the ministry’s offer to find new schools for them conveniently close to their homes. However, the students and parents were concerned that the quality of these alternative schools wouldn’t match that of Bodindecha.
Secondly, the ministry’s plan to encourage students to consider other options, such as vocational colleges, doesn’t seem to have worked well, since many parents and students perceive vocational schools as inferior.
In fact, the future job market will require more people with specific technical skills. Some parents nevertheless cling to the long-standing belief that graduates of prestigious high schools have better career opportunities. Add to that the fact that the reputation of many vocational schools has been tarnished by years of brawls among rival students.
These are just some of the issues the responsible agencies must tackle in order to improve the education of our young people.
The basic issue is that the school system has a problem of quality, not quantity. But numbers have been the determinant factor for educators and the Education Ministry for years. For instance, state schools receive a budget in proportion to the number of students, not their academic standards. Therefore, the bigger schools can afford to invest in even more facilities to attract even more students because of the extra funding. And this leads to a vicious cycle of failure, because bigger classroom sizes in public schools ― often 50 students or more ― is not conducive to learning, with students too often neglected by their teachers.
In addition, the ministry tends to focus on providing material teaching aids rather than better-quality teachers. Education Minister Suchart Tadathamrongvej has said that the free computer-tablet project would help revolutionize the school system, but this will not be the case. The ministry and its educators and bureaucrats place too much emphasis on material investments, hoping for an instant solution. This is despite the fact that students ask for nothing except good-quality teaching. The government needs to think more about investing in people rather than populist material handouts that will not cure the ills of the system in the long term.
