A Hobby among Thai Children:
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My family and I had been in Thailand for almost a month now. We're trying to settle down with our new life in our old place.... Well, things had changed quite a bit though.
We spent some of our saving money on renovating our house--- buying new home appliances, carpet/curtain installation, new furniture and so on.... Furthermore, we had to find a new school for our kids and I had to prepare my lecture....
So we had been pretty busy....
After a while, I noticed something pretty odd though (at least for me).... When I drove by a downtown area during weekends, I expected that there should be less people and vehicles in the area. However, it's totally different from what I thought. So I tried to see what was happening in those areas.
Noticeably, most of them were young teenagers, wandering around, in and out from buildingings to buildings.... So I looked for the signs and found my answer.... These were tutoring schools!!
Sometimes, when I called my close friends during a weekend, I always caught them up during their way to a tutoring school... Furthermore, even for my president's children, he said he had to bring his children to have some tutoring as well....
Wow, after I did some rough calculations in my heads, many of Thai children spent more than 60 hours a week for their "education" from kindergarten until highschool.... Totally, it would be 46,800 hours before they became a college student!!
Well, for me, that's enough to be awarded as a PhD graduate and might be sufficient to discover a major scientific breakthrough or invent a new invention into a patent!! Yet, we didn't have any of those comparable to what our children had invested their lives upon.
Are these "tutoring" helping and uplifting their lives into a higher standard?--- I didn't ask for what good that it makes for the country... just for themselves at this beginning.
At my kids' school, it also offered a wide range of "tutoring" in a packet... Well, since we planned to have many things to do as a family, I never signed them up to any of those. I still adhere with my lifestyle that we had done when we were living in the US.
For example, in Saturday morning, many of Americans would bring their children to play sports--- ranging from soccer, football, baseball, tennis and so on. In our case, we brought our sons to play tennis during weekends... and we still did the same here in Thailand.... But, there was no one bringing their kids to play at all in my neighborhood. Tennis courts we went were filled with adults or retirees....
Well, apparently, I would guess many of them were commuting from their houses to those buildings--- thinking about how to solve a math or physics problem and got a better score in the next Entrance Examination.... If my bold yet grim conjectures were true, I would change my career to a psychologist or a therapist in the next few years. I would make a bunch of money from possible distorted behaviors among Thai teenagers and young adults....
Presumably, commitsuicide attempts would be skyrocketing from such failures in many who could not attain accomplishment in this fashion....
Life should be so stressful..... Society should be injured and irreversibly damaged. Worst of all, the final painful results are yet to come.
Are we defining "happiness and life" in a harsh way?
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Create Date : 11 กุมภาพันธ์ 2551 |
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5 comments |
Last Update : 11 กุมภาพันธ์ 2551 14:48:07 น. |
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Glad to know that you are settle well.. so,your children get used to about Thailand?
When I was in secondary and highschool, I went to tutor a lot in order to prepare for entrace exam. It was so tired indeed when I was in high-school.
Enjoy life!