Thailand country report: Community development through secondary schools

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Introduction Secondary education aims basically to give students the general knowledge and skills to enable them to earn a living, or to become apprentices, or to continue their studies at a higher level. It also aims, at a deeper level, to explore and promote the interests and aptitudes of each student, taking into account his/her individual differences. Such a philosophy has not always been the underlying concept adhered to by Thai educators, despite the fact that the first state secondary school came into being in the late nineteenth century. It is generally accepted that the year 1960 marked a turning-point in the history of Thailand’s secondary education organization. Since it was in that year that the first comprehensive school was established at Suranari Witthaya, a leading girls’ school in the north-east. Under this system, both practical/academic and vocational subjects would be taught at the secondary level, so that students, with different and varied aptitudes, abilities and interests, would be able to develop their individual potentials. From 1960 onward, there have been three types of secondary school in Thailand, corresponding roughly to the British system of grammar school, comprehensive school and technical school. The comprehensive secondary school differs from the academic and vocational secondary schools in that both streams are combined in one school, under a single administrative staff. The success of the early comprehensive schools was such that a committee, appointed in 1965 by the Ministry of Education to study the feasibility of the new system, readily recommended its expansion. The recommendation was backed up by a research committee on secondary education and human resource development which had made a thorough study on educational needs in Thailand. Thus, the expansion of comprehensive schools has ever since become a national policy. At the initial stages, the expansion programme was assisted by the Canadian Government under the Colombo Plan. The first Comprehensive School Project (also known as the CIDA Project, after the Canadian International Development Agency) was launched in 1966. A diversified curriculum was introduced in 20 secondary schools, selected from all regions of the country. The project was successful in so far as it managed to respond to individual differences and, to a certain extent, to impede the flow to the capital of provincial students in search of secondary education. Despite the encouraging results of this pilot project, the Ministry of Education, faced with financial constraints, had to settle for a less ambitious reform which would be within the Ministry’s budgetary capacity. The same comprehensive curriculum was kept but the teaching/learning programmes were reduced in scope. This was well demonstrated in another improvement project for medium-sized secondary schools (600-1000 enrolments), which started two years earlier in 1964 and was to last until 1973. With initial assistance from UNICEF, the project was aimed at providing buildings, workshops, other types of school accommodation, and necessary teaching materials and equipment as required by the 1960 diversified curriculum. Although the improvement of only 127 schools could be funded entirely by UNICEF, the Ministry managed to