It has been pointed out that the political messages from both sides of polarized Thailand, even when they are in English, are very much oriented to a Thai audience. They therefore use a Thai discourse which either looks deceptively familiar to non-Thais (and so is almost certainly going to be misinterpreted), or they sound a bit off.

One such oddity is the insistence on ‘correctness’. Take, for example, the official Thai government announcement when the Internal Security Act was invoked in early April:

‘Many demonstrators gathering in the said areas may not realise that their action violates the law. The Prime Minister said that the authorities would continue to talk to and ensure correct understanding among the demonstrators.’

After the crackdown on 19 May, the government’s mouthpiece stepped in to make sure the ignorant and easily misled foreign news organizations knew that, despite all appearances, wasn’t in fact a crackdown:

‘Deputy Secretary-General to the Prime Minister and Acting Government Spokesperson, Dr Panitan Wattanayagorn, said that the clarification will be made to ensure correct understanding of the world that the operation was to cordon off the protest areas, not to crackdown on the protestors.’

And the Public Relations Department’s write-up of PM Abhisit’s reconciliation plan expresses things this way:

‘In this regard, for Thai society to return to normalcy, every Thai has the duty to protect the monarchy from being drawn into the present conflict, and to work together to uphold and promote a correct understanding about the institution.’

Now to the untutored outsider, the principles behind this belief system appear to be (a) there is only one ‘correct’ view of a situation; (b) all you have to do to change people’s minds is to tell them what this ‘correct’ interpretation is; and (c) once they have heard the ‘correct’ opinion and automatically accepted it (because it is after all ‘correct’) then all will be harmony and normalcy and happily ever after.

Is this North Korea? Is this 1984?

But didn’t this all start because different people had arrived at their own ideas about what was ‘correct’? Surely an insistence that there is only one correct point of view is no road to reconciliation. Or even political maturity.

But go back to how Thais are taught. And tested.

I recently heard of a Thai university course in English literature where Dickens’ Hard Times was giving the students a truly hard time. They found it hard to identify Mr Gradgrind’s obsession with facts as a parody when they’d spent most of their lives in an education system equally obsessed with correct facts.

One telling feature about the Thai education system is the way that all subject matter is treated as if it were arithmetic. One plus one equals two and that’s a fact. But so are the ‘facts’ of English grammar (even if native speakers neither know nor use these ‘facts’), so are the ‘facts’ of history (which is just a compilation of ‘facts’ about important dead people – mostly male), and so are the ‘facts’ in subjects like art or philosophy or literature, where you’d think opinions and value judgements ought to carry some weight.

And since education is seen as a matter of ‘giving’ ‘knowledge’ in the form of ‘facts’, then testing is simple. You just find out how successfully the passive recipients (students) have acquired the correct facts. And that is easily achieved by a multiple-choice test. In any subject.

Now you don’t have to look far through an average Thai school test to discover lots of questions with more than one correct answer among the multiple choices. If you bother to point this out the teacher and give proof that at least one of the ‘incorrect’ choices is in fact correct, you are likely to be told ‘but that is not what they’ve been taught.’ In other words, this is not the ‘correct’ answer in the fake world of facts that the education system has dreamed up, even if it is the answer you find in the real world.

When what is ‘correct’ is spelled it with such misguided clarity, the name of the educational game is to avoid errors. And the simplest way to avoid saying anything incorrect is to say nothing at all. Which is why university teachers hardly ever have to tell their classes to shut up and stop interrupting the steady recitation of correct facts from the lectern.

A similar problem is afflicting the French education system. But they’re worried about it. So the École Normale Supérieure in Paris is at the moment hosting a “festival of errors” in an attempt to celebrate mistakes. Like the ones that led Fleming to the discovery of penicillin, or Pasteur to the discovery of a cholera vaccine, or Columbus to the discovery of the Americas. They hope in this way to dispel the numbing paralysis that comes from not knowing the ‘correct’ answer.

And lots of luck trying to explain that to your average Thai teacher.

About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).