Education Minister Phongthep Thepkanjana has admitted that the Thai education system lags seriously behind its ASEAN counterparts. He called for serious changes to the Thai education curriculum, in light of this revelation.
Phongthep said that even though the country spends 20% of its annual budget on education, the results are still “unsatisfactory.” He noted that the ministry now plans to institute reforms in the system, starting by doing away with pure memorization work. Instead, students and teachers should focus on teaching the students to analyze concepts, he said.
In addition to this, the Minister noted that Thai students still desperately need to improve their English listening and speaking skills. To address this shortcoming, the ministry will be hiring more English-speaking teachers to teach Thai kids.