Let's hear it for kids

re: "Education 'reform' is an utter failure" (BP, December 14, 2020)

Dear editor,

Like those preaching sufficiency from plush luxury, the well fed Ministry of Education does what decades of enforced Thai tradition made up from the 1950s designed it to do.

We know what happens if Thai students start reading, especially if they start reading English, if they become informed, and worst of all if they catch the habit of thinking critically as mathematics teaches, or of thinking honestly, as science teaches: students whose education enables insight into reality protest at the shameful failure in education among much else that the Thai nation has been made by decade after decade of coup after coup after coup. All of those coups have been committed for one primary reason: to prop up a status quo that enables the traditional corruptions whilst enforcing ignorance of Thai affairs behind veils of forced adulation for big heads got up in uniforms that, whether actual or actively aping it, consistently symbolize the militaristic face of the calculated repression of the Thai nation to protect the unelected political players battening from behind the veils.

Thai students are as intelligent and eager to learn as any. If they do not, it's because such learning is prevented. Happily, there are young Thais who are well educated. For these  students the veil has been well rent. These educated, aware, morally informed students critically aware of the Thai reality are those protesting on the streets.  These brave, brilliant children, their future and the future of the Thai nation, deserve their parents' and Thai society's full support.

 Felix Qui

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag on December 17, 2020, under the title "Let's hear it for kids" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2036763/not-a-republic-fan