Shermanator

Hhhhmmm, thinking about it - a few hours per week less of bad education is a good thing, no?

I have a 15 year old Thai stepson. He is interested only in games on his smart phone. School work? Nah, can't be bothered. When I go out, nearly all the children I see are doing something with smart phones. Last week he told me he had an English test and he scored 15 out of 20. I asked him to tell me one of the questions but he could not remember even one. Despite having an English person living at home and English lessons at school, his English is appalling. His friends are just the same, don't care about school work under the "no fail" system and think they are clever. Under this system, Thailand be for ever a third world country.

Not only should school hours be increased, there should be less holidays, failure should be failure and children made to study both at school and at home with vast amounts of homework to get them away from computer games.

Can't understand Thai parents either who allow this situation to persist.

Most Thai parents don't care, plus they don't have the backbone to push their kids forward. Just look at your failed attempts. Now you have a different mindset and try your bst, still can't get him to learn. What do you think the average Thai parents can achieve, given they have next to none education and no interest in their kids education either. At our school I see parents, aunts and uncles dropping the kids off like sending dirty laundry to the shop. No kiss, no hug, no goodbye or , "Be a good boy!"... The parents who care are the businesspeople from around here, the more clever ones. They hug their kids goodbye or even give them a kiss, you can see they care, and you can see why they made it to kind of middle class and why the others still ride rotten Honda Dreams from 1973 with a sidecar that will fall apart any moment... There are Thais out there who WANT to get outta there, live a good life and are prepared to work for that. Their kids will follow suit. Most of the others will be lost as their parents are lost too...

I remember that school was out for me usually around 01:00 to 02:00 pm. That left ample time to get back home, get home work done, grab a snack and the play outside, ride the bike to the forests, go swimming, whatever. I had a great life as a kid. When I look at our boys now, earliest they'll be home is 03:30pm, mostly 05:15pm if they do special learning. Home work isn't much, possible to get it done in 30mins which is ok. This is a village school.

My friend's kids however, who go to school in the next greater town, leave earliest 05:15pm, then have to go with the school bus for 50mins and come home with a s-load of home work you wouldn't believe! At times his kids are doing home work in his restaurant until 09:00pm and later! The girls are completely exhausted, and this can't be good for them.

A proper educational system would teach kids the must have basics and common knowledge in the morning to leave two hours to learn something they really love to do, like arts, photography, dance, sports, whatever and give the kids space to explore and find out what they want to do or to be in life.

Thailand, with its system of repetition and brainwash (greatest country in the world, never been occupied nor colonized BS, etc.), is unfit to move ahead into the future. They have to start by creating proper teachers, not teachers who learned repetition from their teachers. With a useless school system like the actual one, cutting or adding hours wouldn't change a damn thing. Thus I voted "it depends"...