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New Challenges for Thai Education
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Thailand's economic competitiveness has declined significantly in recent years. The low quality of the labour force and weaknesses in the education system have made it difficult to adopt new technology and increase productivity. Unless there are significant improvements in the delivery of social service, particularly education and training, Thailand will experience problems in moving to the next stage of development. In order to meet the challenges in education for restructuring of the Thai economy and society for sustainable development, there is an urgent call for reengineering education in Thailand. Fortunately, the new Constitution of 1997 has introduced challenging guidelines for educational development, especially the enactment of the national education law which will be the country's first blueprint on comprehensive education reform.
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9.1 Challenging Guidelines for Educational Development
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The new Constitution promulgated in October 1997 provides challenging guidelines for future development of education in Thailand. The Constitution contains so many provisions relating to education that it can be called "The Educational Charter". Several provisions relating to education in the 1997 Constitution present clear future perspectives of Thai education and is expected to help solve the current problems of education and training. As it is stated in Section 81 that the State shall "improve education to be in harmony with economic and social change", it means that the government is required to initiate educational reform whenever it is necessary to keep up with the pace of change.
Besides, it is stated in the Constitution for the first time that the Thai people will have the equal right to receive basic education for at least 12 years, with quality and free of charge (Section 43) which will make it more possible to expand basic education to 12 years to raise the quality of the people.
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