Thai Minister of Education Teerakiat Jareonsettasin poses a rhetorical question as he ponders the task of making innovation a bigger engine of economic growth: Would people prefer an electric car developed in the Southeast Asian nation, or one made by Tesla Inc?
“Are you dreaming?” Teerakiat said in an interview. “We cannot even invent a motorbike.”
Teerakiat, who said he is Thailand’s 20th education minister in 17 years, is trying to close the skills gap in a country struggling to match some of the education gains made by Southeast Asian neighbors.
Illustration: Constance Chou
His strategy includes giving more autonomy to schools, universities and teachers to boost standards. He also advises retaining a focus on traditionally strong sectors, such as food, healthcare and tourism.
Thailand’s challenge is a major one: The latest results from the Program for International Student Assessment, performed every three years by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, ranked it 54 out of 70 countries, even though education received about a fifth of the 2.73 trillion baht (US$81.6 billion) annual budget, one of the largest expenditure items.
Singapore was the top performer in the PISA assessment, with Japan second, Taiwan fourth, China sixth and Vietnam eighth.
“We have a big gap in this country,” Teerakiat said, referring to the assessment rankings, which showed Thai students’ scores for mathematics, sciences and reading falling sharply since the 2012 survey to well below the international average.
“Whatever we have done, has not worked,” he said of past improvement efforts.
Since seizing power three years ago, Thailand’s military government has put the spotlight on promoting innovation and advanced industries to help lift the economy from the middle-income trap under a plan called Thailand 4.0.
One area of focus is industrial development along the eastern seaboard, including a 619 million baht plan to bolster vocational training. Thailand realizes it needs to upgrade workforce skills to support the US$45 billion Eastern Economic Corridor project, Thai Minister of Information and Communication Technology Uttama Savanayana told Bloomberg last month.
Yet with the working age population expected to shrink by about 11 percent as a share of the total population by 2040, “the education and skills challenge takes on a special importance and urgency,” World Bank Southeast Asia country director Ulrich Zachau said in Bangkok.
“On the one hand, Thailand is rapidly aging and, on the other hand, the need for skilled workers is rapidly increasing in an ever more integrated world with ever faster technological advances,” he said.
High levels of digitization and Internet penetration make Thailand an attractive destination for information-technology companies to pilot new products, said Anip Sharma, a senior vice president with responsibility for Southeast Asia at global education sector consultancy Parthenon-EY. “But it’s not a great place to develop a product.”
He said that one of the biggest problems is a lack of English-language penetration, a key skill when it comes to bringing about transformation in the digital age.
Another issue is that most graduates are schooled using old-fashioned methods, such as rote learning, and lack the critical thinking skills needed to develop creative software solutions, veteran Thai software developer Panutat Tejasen said.
“My company pays those newbies just to teach them knowledge on how to write usable software programs before they can start working and making money,” said Tejasen, whose Art and Technology group employs more than 200 software designers and “pays six months salary for every new staff [member] with no business benefit in return.”
Natavudh Pungcharoenpong, founder of Bangkok-based e-book publisher Ookbee, which has more than more than 8 million members across Southeast Asia, blames obsolete thinking for holding back his business.
“There are new businesses that cannot be governed by the existing mindset of the authorities,” Natavudh said. “That is not the way to drive growth.”
He cites as examples his own difficulties convincing authorities to extend a value-added tax exemption on printed books to electronic books, as well as the way regulations make it challenging for services such as Uber and Facebook to operate.
The National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission could not immediately be reached to comment about regulations governing Facebook. The Department of Land Transport said Uber is viewed as illegal.
Sharma said nearby countries such as Vietnam were doing much better at encouraging new thinking, despite being poorer.
Thailand’s history of political turmoil is not conducive to encouraging improvements to the education system, either, Sharma said.
“There has not been a consistent approach to strong implementation and that has hurt Thailand, big time,” he said.
“We have 20,000 bureaucrats who do not teach, but are running schools,” Teerakiat said in the interview on Wednesday last week, signaling that one of the main obstacles to reform might be the education ministry itself. “In Vietnam, there’re only 70 in their ministry.”
Teerakiat, who has a background in child and adolescent psychiatry, said corruption is another problem.
“If I were like the previous politicians, I would be the richest man this month,” he said, pointing out that the minister of education has discretion over 4 billion baht in unspent education budget funds.
Teerakiat said a bottom-up strategy that gives schools and universities more autonomy to make decisions is the best way forward. The same principle should apply to teacher training because it suffered in the past from rigid central planning that demoralized teachers, he said.
Teerakiat announced a new voucher system earlier this month that enables universities and colleges to offer their own courses and gives prospective teachers the freedom to choose areas they want to be trained in. He has also asked his department to come up with a plan to establish a new Ministry of Higher Education.
“The Web site for teacher training, usually there is only one or two hits, if you are lucky,” he said. “Yesterday alone: 28.8 million hits. It is just amazing to see when you use the market system, when you empower them, when you abolish the central planning, use the bottom up approach, things work phenomenally. It has never happened in Thailand.”
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