YASOTHON, Thailand – Every May in this quiet provincial
capital, people gather to fire elaborately designed handmade
gunpowder rockets into the atmosphere. The Rocket Festival
is held to wake the great dragon in the sky, so that he will
splash in his lake and bring rain. This ancient ritual speaks
volumes about the importance of tradition here.
Surrounded by lush rice paddies and stands of cassava plants
and sugar cane. Yasothon city at first glance stands in sharp
contrast to the high-rise buildings and dense traffic jams
of Bangkok, which lies some 530 kilometers to the southwest.
More than 95 percent of the people in Yasothon province live
in the countryside and Yasothon city is by most standards
just a small agricultural town.
Yet, despite the pastoral environment, the province is not
at all insulated from the processes of global transformation
and modernization that are bringing change throughout the
country.
 Western
businesses are beginning to set up shop in Yasothon city.
A Seven-Eleven convenience market opened up recently and there
is talk – hopeful talk – that a Kentucky Fried
Chicken restaurant will soon follow. A factory to assemble
videotapes has brought the flavor of high-tech industry to
the region. On the dark side, a local NGO runs a camp to shelter
youth who have AIDS and have come back home from the big city
to die.
Against this backdrop, it is not difficult to understand
the success of Santitham School, a Baha’i-sponsored
primary school with an enrollment of about 500 students. In
contrast to most of the schools in the region, whether private
or public, Santitham focuses on providing a learning environment
that encourages a global vision.
And despite the relatively remote and isolated nature of
Yasothon, parents are increasingly recognizing the need for
their children to have an education that prepares them to
become world citizens.
“We need to go along with the current of globalization,”
said Rungtiwa Kongskul, who has an eight-year-old daughter
at Santitham. “I like the diversity at Santitham, the
staff from different nations. This way my child will learn
to communicate and associate with people from other countries.”
Santitham also stands out for its emphasis on moral education
and its progressive educational model. Its reputation for
excellence was recently confirmed by an award from the Ministry
of Education, which proclaimed it the second best medium-sized
school in the entire northeast region of Thailand. The award
compared Santitham with more than 2000 other schools in eight
provinces.
“We want to produce a new generation of children, that
is our goal,” said Nawarat Wongsopa, director of Santitham.
“We want to prepare a generation of children who believe
in unity in diversity, who practice world citizenship, and
who are ready to help serve humanity.”
Founded in 1967, Santitham has struggled towards that goal
for more than 25 years. Supported at first almost entirely
by the Thai Baha’i community, the school has had its
ups and downs as it faced the sorts of difficulties experienced
by any relatively under-funded new project. In recent years,
however, it has at last come quite close to being self-supporting.
And it is now certainly considered among the best schools
in Yasothon city; its students include many children from
the families of top-ranking civil servants and military officers.
One of Santitham’s big attractions is the fact that
it offers instruction in English, which is spoken by very
few people here. And the quality of the English instruction
national youth volunteers who come to the school as part of
a year-of-service concept endorsed by many Baha’i institutions
around the world.
This year, four young people from Canada and Ireland are
working as unpaid volunteers. Last year, the group included
six students from Canada, Ireland, Malaysia, Scotland, and
the United States. These youth bring a particular brand of
idealism and vision that is very much in line with the school’s
own philosophy.
“I wanted to serve humanity in a tangible way,”
said Roya Ravanbakhsh, a 21-year-old woman from Vancouver,
Canada, who served in 1997. “The school really needs
help, so I feel really needed here. There are only a few other
foreigners in Yasothon. The culture is very Thai here. If
you go someplace and you work in a different culture, you
are serving humanity just by breaking down barriers. And that
is what I believe we help to do here.”
 Municipal
education officials agree that Santitham’s role is important
to the region’s future. “The world is moving to
be one,” said Pean Pakpeal, the Yasothon district education
officer. “So English language instruction will help
inter-link the nations. I think Santitham is leading the way
in preparing the students to fit in with a more global community.”
The school’s emphasis on moral education is also distinctive.
At all levels and in all classes, the teachers emphasize courtesy
and good behavior, as well as more sophisticated concepts
like tolerance for other religions and peoples and the understanding
that all humanity is one.
“We follow the compulsory curriculum that is used
throughout Thailand, but also add a strong element of moral
education,” said Naiyana Wongsopa, the school’s
principal, who is married to Mr. Wongsopa. “Every morning
before the teachers start class, they talk with the children
about virtues like honesty, unity and love, and about how
to live together peacefully and how to share with each other.
This is emphasized every day.”
Some of the teachers put it more simply. “Here the
teachers treat the children like family,” said Tassanee
Nantum, a mathematics teacher who previously worked at a large
private school in eastern Thailand. “We nurture them.”
Educators at other schools say they can tell the difference
in the behavior of the children from Santitham. “From
what I have observed,” said Chamroon Phaipaim, the director
of the Anuban Yasothon School, one of the largest public schools
in the city, “the students from Santitham school are
better behaved than the students from other schools in the
city-and also better prepared to study.”
Paitun Hienthag, a public school teacher who has two daughters
at Santitham, said it is much to Santitham’s credit
to spend the time and effort on moral education when many
schools are focusing purely on academic skills. “Right
now in Thailand, everyone is concerned with survival,”
he said. “So it is a difficult time to bring in concepts
of moral education.”
But Santitham school officials said that training students
in moral virtues is as important to their mission as academic
performance. To that end, the school strives to practice what
it preaches. The school has also been involved in small projects
aimed at improving the social and economic development of
the entire community. These projects currently include: 1)
the provision of assistance, in the form of moral education
classes, to Youth and Children for Development, the local
NGO that works with young people afflicted with AIDS; 2) the
training of teachers and workers at village child care centers,
a project that saw the involvement of some 80 participants
in 10 villages for two days in May; and 3) a project to offer
sewing classes for women in cooperation with the Non-Formal
Education Center of Yasothon.
“We want our school to be like a miniature society,”
said Mr. Wongsopa, “a model of what we would like society
to manifest one day, so that all members of this mini-society
will grow up to be loving and contributing members of the
community at large with the realization that they are world
citizens.”
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