Poor schools are at the heart of Thailand’s political malaise

Everyone knows that nurturing brainboxes is good for an economy. In Thailand, school reformers have an extra incentive: to narrow differences between rich people in cities and their poorer rural cousins, which have led to a decade of political tension and occasional eruptions of violence. For years shoddy teaching has favoured urban children whose parents can afford to send them to cramming schools or to study abroad. Dismal instruction in the countryside has made it easier for city slickers from posh colleges to paint their political opponents as pliable bumpkins. The dangerous social divide is all the more reason to worry about Thailand’s poor rating in an educational league table published in December. Thailand limped into the bottom quarter of 70 countries whose pupils participated in the maths, reading and science tests organised under the Programme for International Student Assessment. Its scores have deteriorated since a previous assessment in 2012, when researchers found that almost one-third of the country’s 15-year-olds were “functionally illiterate”, including almost half of those studying in rural schools.