So we’ve all had a smug smirk about the purported link between suppressing sexual urges and playing football advanced by NIETS. NIETS is one of these outfits whose name slowly drifts into absurdity. OK, it is National; but it gives the word Institute something of a bad name; it has clear difficulties understanding what might be Educational; its competence in Testing is a joke; and the Service it provides appears to be counterproductive.
Notice by the way the coincidence of NIETS’ revelation that football is the cure for sexual lust and Thailand’s latest World Cup humiliation. Does the Thai national football team not have strong enough urges to make them better footballers?
And let’s have no more of this sexist talk about girls not playing football. That’s not the point. It is a well known cultural fact that proper Thai young ladies (the kind that need to be singled out by school exams) don’t know what a sexual urge is. It’s in their genes. (And not their knickers.) So no wonder women’s football in Thailand is going nowhere.
And before we move on to the meat of the article, it should also be pointed out that the 2 most pilloried items on the NIETS tests are from the papers on Health. But this is the only subject where scores are at all presentable. Whatever sniggers we may have about NIETS’ ideas on hormone control, the students taking the test didn’t find it much of a problem.
No one seems to be making the same complaints about the papers on Maths. But the scores there are truly abysmal, with the vast majority of test-takers scoring between 0% and 10%.
But let’s now look at the explanation by the Chair of the Executive Committee of NIETS, Khun Somwang Phithiyanuwat, as to why the very questions provoking scornful sniggers in the media are in fact perfectly valid. The content of the questions is in line with the syllabus designed by the Ministry of Education, he says, and they test whether the students have memorized what is in the textbook.
I am sure he is correct in this and I am also confident that as long as such people hold such ideas, Thai education will continue to be an ever-increasing waste of resources. (Know that in terms of GDP and government budget, Thailand outspends many similar countries while seriously underperforming on (truly valid) international academic tests.)
This reduces education to the important but insufficient act of memorizing facts, something that was already being questioned by Dickens over 150 years ago in Hard Times.
And let’s get something straight. An education that is nothing more than rote memorization is deficient in many important ways. But so is an education system that does not demand any memorization. A syllabus, and its corresponding tests, that deal only with what is to be memorized would be lacking, but not necessarily wrong as far as it goes.
But Thai textbooks are also wrong. They confuse fact with opinion, or at least the opinions that some blinkered reactionary wants everyone to have. They hold tightly to the clearly wrong-headed belief that every fact is as crystal clear and incontrovertible as that one that says 1 plus 1 equals 2, with no shades of grey or fuzzy edges of doubt. And textbooks implicitly have a monopoly on truth.
So when the test asked students to identify the word spelled correctly and listed ‘dinner’ and ‘diner’, it was no use pointing out to the teacher who wrote the item that both words exist and both spellings are correct. Only ‘dinner’ was in the textbook, so only ‘dinner’ could be right.
Students know these rules of the game. They know that they should not use all their brains, just the memory part. They don’t expect their textbooks or their teachers to tell them things that should be tested against their experience of the real world. And they know they will be rewarded not for telling the truth, but for repeating what they have been told, true or not.
And while the columnists are bashing NIETS and NIETS is bashing the teachers, recall that it is the red shirts who are bashing an unnamed teacher in Phitsanulok for asking his students to collect information and try figure out an opinion for themselves based on what they find out.
That sounds like a rough but workable definition of what education should be. But many teachers will tell you that the students don’t want it, because the system doesn’t reward it. The system doesn’t want it because the educational hierarchy, of which NIETS is only one highly visible and risible part, is founded on quite different principles.
But it also looks like Thai society doesn’t want it.