Thailands ‘Bad Students’ take learning to the streets

A well-behaved teenage girl, donning a bob haircut with daisies painted
on her fingernails, seeing the world keenly through her owl glasses barely looks
like a rebel.

But, looks can be misleading.

In the eyes of Thailand’s ultra-conservative school system, Benjamaporn “Ploy”
Nivas, a 15-year-old girl, has been cast as a rebel for daring to express
herself.

She is on the front lines of Thailand’s “Bad Student” movement which is
planning a rally in Bangkok on Saturday.

“Students should
be able to think for themselves and be themselves,” Ploy told AFP during a
recent protest at Bangkok’s democracy monument.

Thailand schools
follow very strict dress codes, with ponytails and ribbons obligatory for girls
and military-style crew cuts for boys.

However, after years
of complying with them, Ploy and her fellow high school activists have gone off
the rails, encouraged by the broader political protest movement currently going
on in Thailand.

The students want a
cultural change, a restructured curriculum, equality and to break free from the
stringent rules binding them. The students are brainwashed, taught to only listen,
but not speak up and memorize for exams, Ploy said.

History textbooks are
an apple of discord in a country marked with a dozen coups since becoming a
democracy in 1932. School books have extenuated the massacre of pro-democracy
university students in the 1970s and instead, only further the work of the
monarchy.

The campaign has seen
mixed reactions from the teachers.

“If my teachers
are on same side with me, the democracy side, they will admire me — but if
they want (the status quo) those teachers hate me,” Ploy said.

Since July, Thailand
has been a spectator to youth-led pro-democracy demonstrations that have been mostly
peaceful. But on Tuesday, police used water cannons and tear gas on activists
as a rally and six people suffered gunshot wounds.

Even though danger persists,
Ploy believes protesting is her duty.”We cannot afford to be afraid of anything,
otherwise we cannot change anything,” she said.

The Bad Student
movement has pushed for the resignation of Education Minister Nataphol
Teepsuwan since August and even staged a mock funeral for him.

Thailand’s schools
need reforms from a long time, but progress has been minimal, Pumsaran
Tongliemnak, an expert at the state-backed Equitable Education Fund, said. The government
needs to press on improving the quality of education, especially for those who
cannot afford private school, he told AFP.

“The gap between
the haves and the have-nots is quite high,” Pumsaran said.

Thai students have
less score than the OECD average in Maths and Science in international
assessment and are particularly bad at reading.

A World Bank report in
2015 noted widespread “functional illiteracy” among students across
all types of Thai schools. Problems mainly include shortage of teachers,
under-resourced small schools and focus on rote-learning.

Despite government
efforts to ban corporal punishment, it is still practiced in Thai schools.

Teenage girls are the spine
of the Bad Student movement, mainly due to frustrations over gender inequality
in Thailand. 

“I think that
girls and LGBTQ people are suppressed by the patriarchy both at home and at
school. This has made me come out to fight for myself and for everyone,”
she said.

Scores of female
students tied white ribbons on the gate of the high school at an early October
rally. They hid the student identification numbers embroidered on their
uniforms with tape and shielded their faces from the media throng.

A young female student
leader gave a passionate speech standing atop a truck outside the school,
demanding teachers to stop “preaching about rules”.

Vegas, a 16-year-old
transgender student, shares this sentiment as he was forced to change schools because
of discrimination and bullying. Schools are training students for a hierarchical
society, rather than teaching them to challenge it, he said.