Once, I visited one of Bangkok’s skills training academies. These schools, run by either district administrations or the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, offer vocational education for Bangkok residents, allowing them to learn new career-relevant skills. I peeked inside a classroom, and saw a whiteboard filled with numbers.
Was it some sort of mathematics class? You could call it that, but it comes with a special bent. They were numbers, yes, but used for a rather different flavor of calculations than we would think of. It was an astrology class, teaching students the art of fortune-telling.
Perhaps it’s too easy to laugh at the notion of skills training schools equipping Bangkokians for the future by teaching them astrology. So much, after all, for Thailand 4.0. But it also gets at the heart of a core issue that Thailand faces at this general election: should we focus on quick fixes to raising living standards, or on sustainable solutions to increasing the competitiveness of our workforce?
The different political parties, of course, lean towards the former: hence why we see various proposals to raise the minimum wage or the monthly allowance available to pracharath card holders. And even when we talk about up-skilling schemes such as the one available in Bangkok’s vocational training academies, we still see shortcuts: a fortune-telling career is probably genuinely a good path to earning money in Thailand, but it does nothing to future-proofing our labor force and making Thailand more competitive on the world stage.
When asked about how the government should approach the question of the minimum wage at a recent debate, Chart Thai Pattana member Santi Kiranand argued that this question is besides the point. We should focus instead, he argued, on the target wage: how can we raise people’s skills so that they earn the wages commensurate with their highly skilled status?
It’s worth, then, to take some time looking at the policies related at long-term upgrading of our labor force that are being proposed by the different political parties. One is to make an undergraduate education free, which would allow many more people to pursue a tertiary degree. This policy has been proposed by various parties from across the political spectrum, such as the Democrats, Seri Ruam Thai, and Thai Sang Thai.
Suchatvee Suwansawat of the Democrat Party has also proposed that every region must have what he terms a “full-curriculum” university with education offerings in every field. Currently, he says, the provinces of Phuket, Pang-nga and Phuket do not have such a university, meaning that students who want to study engineering, medicine or law must move to faraway provinces. The solution he proposes is the creation of an ‘Andaman University’ to meet these unfulfilled needs.
At the same time, the Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI) recently released a report stating that an emphasis on university-level education is misguided. The bigger issue, they argued, is the fact that many in Thailand still do not even complete their schooling, with over half of students from the poorest ten percent failing to proceed beyond ninth grade.
In addition, TDRI also suggested that the various political parties were too narrowly focused in their education proposals, discussing only the need for students to acquire more programming and language skills. Undoubtedly, these are important issues, but they are insufficient for true curricula reform. They implored the political parties to think broader in scope, ensuring that students acquire a variety of needed knowledge, skills and attitudes.
The state of our education is dire indeed. Before we even discuss the need for Thai students to be able to code or acquire another language, let’s remember that basic reading and writing still poses a tremendous challenge: the PISA 2018 exams, which test maths, science and reading, revealed that Thailand ranked 66th among 79 countries. Few statistics bode more poorly for the competitiveness of our future workforce than that.
Finally, it would be no bad thing if we could see more policy proposals from the political parties on up-skilling and re-skilling. A recent piece by Heng Molika in The Diplomat suggested that ASEAN governments look at Singapore’s SkillsFuture Initiative — a program of government-funded up-skilling courses — for inspiration. “Not all ASEAN member governments have a budget to sustainably run a free upskilling program on the Singaporean model,” Molika wrote. “Therefore, ASEAN governments, especially those that are lagging behind in terms of digital literacy, should consider initiating workforce digital upskilling subsidy programs.”
Whether or not this recommendation is suitable for Thailand — whose labor force may want up-skilling in other areas as well — is a question political parties should consider.
Is this a path that will win votes? Most likely not. However, these are issues that any serious political party that intends to make Thailand ready for the future would need to grapple with. It is, beyond anything else, an area where Thais truly deserve a contest of ideas.
This is the first of two pieces on policies geared at Thailand’s long-term competitiveness. In the next piece, I’ll take a look at what the different parties have been saying about innovation and industrial strategy.