Everyone knows nurturing brainboxes is good for an economy. In Thailand, school reformers have an extra incentive: to narrow differences between rich people in cities and their poorer rural cousins, which have led to a decade of political tension and occasional eruptions of violence. As in India, for decades teaching has favoured urban children whose parents can afford to send them to cram schools or to study abroad. 

The dangerous social divide is all the more reason to worry about Thailand’s poor rating in an educational league table published in December. Thailand limped into the bottom quarter of 70 countries whose pupils participated in the maths, reading and science tests organised under the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Its scores have deteriorated since a previous assessment in 2012, when researchers found that almost one-third of the country’s 15-year-olds were “functionally illiterate”, with half studying in rural schools.
Thailand’s dismal performance isn’t dramatically out of step with countries of similar incomes. But it’s strange, given its unusually generous spending on education, which in a few years has hoovered up more than a quarter of the budget. Rote learning is common. There’s a shortage of maths and science teachers, but a surfeit of physical-education instructors. Many head teachers lack the authority to hire or fire their own staff. Classrooms are stern and bullying teachers numerous. 

A big problem, argues Dilaka Lathapipat of the World Bank, is that Thailand spends too much money propping up small schools, where teaching is poorest. Almost half of Thai schools have fewer than 120 students, and most of those have less than one teacher per class. 

Prayuth Chan-ocha, Thailand’s prime minister and the leader of its military junta, says school reform is urgently needed. But some of his goals are aimed more at boosting his and the monarchy’s prestige than making children smarter. Soon after taking power in a coup in 2014, Prayuth grumbled that few Thai children could cite the achievements of long-dead kings. He ordered schools to display a list he drew up of 12 ‘Thai values’, including obedience to elders, “correctly” understanding democracy and loyalty to the monarch.

Insiders say some officials are working on better approaches. Last June, the government restarted a long-stalled plan to merge small schools; authorities say they hope to subsume over 10,000 schools in four years. Analysts worry that the junta’s effort to re-centralise government will deprive good schools of independence. But they also hope it will eventually allow reformers to force an ossified education system to adopt best international practices. There’s talk of education reform in a vague 20-year plan which the junta has promised to bequeath to the nation, and which future elected governments will be constitutionally bound to follow. Better hope that the army sets only its sanest policies in stone.