Published on October 13, 2005

A shocking discovery is negatively affecting the government’s grand, much-touted scheme to develop one “dream school” in each district of the country. The schools are, in one way or another, deeply in debt. And it’s all because the central government under PM Thaksin Shinawatra wanted them to be IT-savvy, whether they were ready or not.

Even the vice education minister, Piyabutr Cholvicharn, admitted to being taken aback when he found out that most of the 921 schools slated to join the project are facing serious financial plight. Each school, depending on its size, is estimated to be in debt anywhere from Bt1 million to Bt5 million.

“I must admit that this was something the Education Ministry hadn’t had any inkling about before.

It hadn’t occurred to us that each of these schools had to struggle so hard to borrow money to develop their IT capacity so that they could follow the government’s policy in this regard,” he told reporters.

The distress brought about by the pressure from the central government was highlighted by a report that a director of a dream school in the southernmost town of Sungai Kolok in Narathiwat province committed suicide after he had repeatedly failed to persuade potential sponsors to finance his IT scheme.

According to the local press, the school principal, fearful of being dropped from the dream-school project, sought a Bt3-million loan from a local source, using the school’s own credit as collateral backed by his personal guarantee, to acquire computers and accessories for the school. He soon discovered that his income would not allow him to keep up with interest payments on the loan, let alone repay the original loan. When no assistance was forthcoming, the school director decided to take his own life.

Piyabutr couldn’t confirm or deny this story but he did say that the main reason why the dream schools had plunged into such deep debt was insufficient government funding. In other words, the central authorities were demanding higher standards for local schools, but did not offer the corresponding increases in financial support that their directive would require.

What’s worse, it was never clear what schools were expected to do in order to upgrade their IT capacity. All of the 921 school directors were left to make decisions on that crucial issue for themselves - regardless of whether there was a real need to go all-out to beef up their computer hardware and software in the first place.

In most cases, it was obvious that the need wasn’t there. And in many instances, the Education Ministry authorities weren’t there to provide the necessary guidance and advice. That missing link proved to be fatal for the poor school principals eager to be seen to be following the central government’s haphazard and misguided policy.

It was as if the local schoolmasters were on their own to interpret the prime minister’s off-the-cuff statement to see dream schools popping up all over the country so that he could claim to have taken education reform another step.

Then came the incredible paradox: while the local schools were financially struggling in order to please Bangkok’s powers that be, the premier was talking about spending several billion baht of taxpayers’ money on the One Laptop Per Child project promoted by Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Here then is the real digital divide: the cash-rich, super-sophisticated MIT in the United States was attracting the Thai prime minister’s personal attention - so much so that he declared that he was ready to spend billions of baht to buy 300,000 laptops from the MIT project that cost US$100 (Bt4,100) each - while authorities in remote schools in Thailand were fighting desperate battles with local moneylenders and banks to fulfil the PM’s IT vision.

Negroponte’s dream to provide low-cost computers to the masses is no doubt worthy of consideration by the government. His vision of a grassroots movement in which low-cost PCs will spread in popularity like the Linux operating system or the Wikipedia free online encyclopaedia is certainly exciting.

But the prime minister’s tendency to get his priorities wrong on the national level is truly frightening.

The financial support required by the dream schools is but a small fraction of what the premier has said he will spend in joining Negroponte’s scheme.

The fact that the local schools’ serious predicament has been so glaringly overlooked is simply scandalous. To use both cases to promote the government’s political agenda while ignoring the desperate pleas for help at home is simply unforgivable.

Suthichai Yoon

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