In Catholic schools, young Thais are educated to grow in society

In relation to such teachings, Prof Chainawrong Monthienvichienchai said that a “Catholic education in all its dimensions has one mission: educate students to grow into a healthy person in physical and moral terms.”

In his address to the Pattaya meeting, Card Michael Michai Kitbunchu, a former president of the Catholic Education Council, told the 444 participants that, “a majority of students in Catholic schools are Buddhists. This means that teachers must refer to the ‘human person’ in terms of other religions.”

Mahasurasak Suramaethee agrees that an “ethical crisis threatens contemporary Thai society.” A member of the Faculty of Humanities at Chulalongkornrajvithayalai University, a Buddhist institution, he was invited to address the Catholic gathering. For him, all religions face this challenge because all of them are called to reaffirm the importance of faith in each domain of knowledge and remind everyone that its value “is almost the same as that of any other discipline”.

For Fr Prapas Sricharoen, “the educational institution should be a society of love; students are not just empty boxes that teachers fill. Their spirituality must also be nurtured.”

Fr Chaonapat Sansanayuth, provincial of the Christian Brothers of La Salle, said that the purpose of the meeting was to draw up the guidelines for Catholic education in order to help students understand the Church and develop in every field.

For Sister Darunee Sripramong, head of the Sacred Heart School in Chiang Mai, because in Thai society minorities are marginalised and treated with condescension, “each year we have our students take part in outdoor immersion programmes. As part of this, they spend a night up in one of 10 to 20 hill villages. They bring their books and material but they also learn from the hill tribes; for instance, the way they cook rice and enjoy life.”

Providing scholarships to poor students is another important issue. One example is the Samakkhi Rongkro School in Klong Toey, one of Bangkok’s seediest neighbourhoods.

Run by Sister Suwan Prarasri, the school provides free education to almost 300 students who cannot afford to pay regular school fees. Many of them come from broken homes with parents in prison. At school, they not only get books and learning material but also meals, school uniforms and shoes.

As of 2008, there were 315 Catholic educational institutions in Thailand, 311 schools, two colleges and two universities with 28,495 teachers and more than half million students, mostly Buddhists, this according to the Catholic Education Council of Thailand.