Education system ´fails ethnic minorities´

Thai hilltribe youth Chindanai Jowalu grumbles that the Thai education system does not help his people maintain their own culture.

Chindanai Jowalu plays a traditional musical instrument at the seminar

He notes how hilltribe students study the same subjects as students living in Bangkok and argues that the present syllabus holds little relevance to the lives of these ethnic youths.

“They want to learn about which plant varieties they can use as food and medicine, not about the length of the Great Wall of China,” he told a Church-run seminar on May 28.

Chindanai says the Thai education system does not take into account that he, as a member of the Pgazkoenyau ethnic community in the northern Chiang Mai province, speaks a different language and has a different lifestyle from students in the capital and other parts of the country.

For decades, Thai hilltribe people have struggled to maintain their lifestyles and cultures in the face of the dominance of the majority Thai national culture.

The Thai Church supports ethnic minorities´ efforts to claim their right to self-determination, according to Father Prasit Rujirat, director of the Thai bishops´ Catholic Commission for Ethnic Groups.

The priest, who chaired the seminar, said the Church supports these ethnic minorities by providing programs focusing on exercising their rights, and organizing public campaigns to raise awareness of ethnic minority issues in cooperation with other organizations.

At the seminar, Orawan Hantalae, an ethnic Moken youth from the southern Phang Nga province, echoed Chindanai´s comments, saying her peers face the same problem of having an education unsuited to their way of life. The Moken are sea gypsies who live on the west coast of Thailand and on the islands of the Andaman Sea.

Students are taught agriculture while their livelihood comes from fishing and diving, she explained. They cannot even plant vegetables on the type of soil where they live, she said.

When they question teachers as to why they are not taught how to fish or make fishing equipment, their teachers just told them that it is not necessary and not in the curriculum, she added.

Both Chindanai and Orawan proposed keeping some core subjects in the existing education system, while providing elective subjects suitable to students´ environments and way of life.

Chindanai and Orawan were special guests at the seminar on “Ethnic Children/Youth and Education in the globalization era” at St. Thomas Hall in Bangkok.

Kwanchiwan Baudaeng, a social science lecturer at Chiang Mai University, said a major challenge for ethnic minority people is making a living in their traditional home regions. Many hilltribe people find that they often end up at tourist attractions, said Kwanchiwan, a keynote speaker at the seminar.

Some have also taken to selling handicrafts, working in construction sites while others have even been driven to prostitution, he pointed out.

Nevertheless, Kwanchiwan said there are still some young ethnic minority people who treasure their traditional knowledge, culture, beliefs and way of life. These people want to preserve these and pass them on to the next generations, he said.

The recent seminar closed with Chindanai and his friend playing a traditional musical instrument called the Aou Nha and reciting a poem that starts with, “I´m Pgazkoenyau, I´m Pgazkoenyau.”