Students in Myanmar have gone on strike following the reopening of classrooms

[ASEAN NOW Content Team]

 

Few pupils are attending school since it reopened on November 1 due to severe security threats and a refusal to support the leadership.

As schools across Myanmar reopen, classrooms are nearly empty, with students and teachers refusing to go.

"I haven't gone to school in a while because there have been recent school explosions."
"None of my friends are going," Chika Ko, a 16-year-old high school student from Pyay, Bago state, said.

 

"My school hasn't been attacked yet, but I'm terrified when I hear about explosions at other schools, so I'm staying at home."

According to Chika Ko, her school usually has 600 kids, but only approximately 20 have shown up in the last few weeks.

Since the military announced the reopening of schools on November 1 following a countrywide suspension in July due to COVID-19, many students, including Chika Ko, have refused to go, both in protest of the generals who seized power in a February 1 coup and out of fear of being attacked.

 

Nay Zin Oo, a Yangon-based parent, is 48 years old.
He has one primary school-aged child and two secondary school-aged children, but he refuses to allow any of them to attend school while the military is in charge of the country.

"The military runs the schools, and as a revolutionary, I refuse to send any of my children there," said Nay Zin Oo, who did not want his real name used for fear of retaliation.

"Sending our children to school indicates that we, as parents, support the military."
I'll only mail them if a different political party wins."

 

As he campaigns for the return to the civilian administration elected in November 2020, he believes that boycotting schools is a powerful way of criticising the military.

He also wants to fight the country's out-of-date educational system.

 

"[Students] won't acquire anything in the current educational system, therefore I don't see the value in sending them."
"When people graduate here, their degrees are only relevant in our country, and even then, they aren't very useful," said Nay Zin Oo, a taxi driver who graduated with a dual degree in engineering and physics.

He cites to his own past as evidence of the current system's shortcomings, despite the fact that little has changed in the core curriculum in the last 20 years.