– Here in Thailand, teachers often want you to solve problems on a PC or pad. Then you should set up a live camera on another gadget where the teacher can see that it is you who does the school work, says Palm. It is a little over 15. Five young people, all 15 years old, meet us in the center of Bangkok. They have left behind two and a half years of pandemic. They are back in physical classrooms. At a new school. They got through the digital eye of the needle. Not everyone did the same thing. Mouthpieces are still mandatory, but soon the five young people on their way down the escalator will probably say goodbye to the pandemic. Photo: Fang Yongbin / news – A friend of mine is really good at school. He had a PC and a mobile phone, but at home he did not have good enough data packages or internet subscriptions. When the web starts to lug, you do not get delivered fast enough. Then the teacher automatically starts drawing points. The grade is bad, says Palm. – And in Thailand, grades mean a lot, all five young people break out. – My friend gave up, almost immediately, and said I will never be able to do this, Palm says. Not all young people’s experiences around the world during the pandemic are similar. Infection waves. Closed schools. Schools reopening. In and out of digital classrooms. Then there are some differences. And the differences the five young people I meet have become more aware of. – In the village where I lived, there were many who perhaps only had a mobile. Then it’s not easy. Mobile internet and broadband are also not well developed. – The government could have done more. They could have created free internet in public places in the local community. Then those who did not have internet could follow the digital teaching there. They could have handed out amphibians and PCs to those who did not, Focus says. Starting at a new school and soon Focus, Flow and Palm may even be able to shed their bandages after two and a half years of pandemic. Photo: Fang Yongbin / news New in the city Four of the five are brand new in Bangkok. Warisara, with the nickname Focus, Natthanicha, with the nickname Aurngaoey, Suphitcha with the nickname, Flow, Pattanan with the nickname Palm. Like everyone in Thailand, they have long intricate names that make everyone use short nicknames. In Thailand, the school year starts at about the same time as the rainy season in May. It is only three weeks since they moved here from the northeast of the country to go to school. The hometown is between four and seven hours drive away. Now that the rainy season is coming to Bangkok, school starts and new passengers that the city’s Sky Train carries to and from school every day. Photo: Fang Yongbin / news Kantapich, nicknamed Data, is the only one of the five from Bangkok. They all attend Triamudom High School, a public school but one of the most difficult to get into in all of Thailand. Only the best ones really apply here. Of 10,000 applicants, 1,000 come in every year. The four immigrants are overwhelmed by the megacity and their new life. – What is different, I ask? – Civilization! The huge malls. At home I look straight at a field. Now I will live alone in this big city, says Focus. She shares a room in a guesthouse with friends. Officially, 10 million of Thailand’s 70 million people live in Bangkok. Unofficially, the number is a few million higher. The Chao Phraya River meanders through the city. It connects Bangkok to the sea. It brings water to Thailand’s most fertile rice fields. A network of channels springs from the student and flows across Bangkok. Smaller side streets protrude from the city’s longest streets. A channel is called a khlong. A side street is called soi. Khlonger and soier connect Bangkok in networks that have supported the city since ancient times. Raised over the city’s problems Bangkok has grown faster than any city planner has managed to keep up with. The stalls on the sidewalks are too many. The traffic is almost impossible to regulate. When everything was too much, the city rose quite literally over the problems that could not be solved. Instead of tackling the impossible task of digging down a subway in the city center, they built the Bangkok Sky Train. A metro that moves in constructions reminiscent of Roman aqueducts cast in polished concrete. Path across the road. Layer upon layer of traffic in Bangkok. Photo: Fang Yongbin / news The most exclusive skyscrapers, office buildings and shopping malls have separate entrances directly from the stations of the Bangkok Sky Train a few floors above street level. From the station on Siam Square and into the Siam One shopping center, there is a steady stream of small clusters of schoolchildren. Siam Square is a hub. The young people sit in all the juice and coffee bars, but they do not hang out. Maybe a little, but not first and foremost. Most are here to meet their private tutors who will provide them with extra tuition. Further back in the shopping centers there are separate cafes where the customers are exclusively schoolchildren. They have desks and small rooms students can rent for private lessons. One of the cafes with desks and small nursery rooms for rent for school children in Bangkok. Photo: Philip Lote / news The days can be long. – Sometimes 2-3 hours of schoolwork and extra hours, says Flow. – Rather 3-5, says Palm, sometimes all evening and all night, says Aurngaoey. Palm says that his parents spend 30,000 bhat or 10,000 kroner a month on private lessons on him alone. None of the friends respond to the amount. In Thailand, the average household income is 27,000 baht a month. Feeling pressured every single day None of these five have any particularly prosperous backgrounds. All five are from families where both parents work. – Do you feel pressure from the family when you know that your parents work so hard for you to succeed, I ask? – Yes, every single day, they all answer in chorus, sugar and laughter. Even here a little higher up, outside a coffee shop in a high corridor through the modern concrete building approx. 100 meters from the station of the Bangkok Skytrain, we feel the particle pollution. Long before the pandemic, Bangkok gasped for air more and more. And air is not just about freedom from face masks and closures, reduction of air pollution and traffic jams. Crowded with people at a market one afternoon in Bangkok. Photo: Fang Yongbin / news Political oxygen Bangkok is a city that needs political oxygen. When Bangkok now wakes up from the pandemic, it is also a city in a country on its way away from military rule. Among many people in Thailand, there is a feeling that they are living with an exhausted political leadership that has no more to give eight years after they seized power. When the 15-year-olds arrived in Bangkok in May, they landed in the middle of the election for a new governor in the city. The first free election in Thailand since the coup in 2014. If they got it? – It was impossible not to notice it. The election posters were everywhere. We stumbled upon them, says Palm. Next year there will be a national election. I ask if democracy is important to them. – Democracy can move Thailand forward, says Focus. We must have more freedom to express ourselves. Then we can get ideas to create something new. Data, the boy from Bangkok, the one who says the least, puts the embarrassment aside. – Democracy allows me to listen and learn what everyone thinks. Thailand needs more discussion, says the quietest in the group. It’s not just about finding your way back to the old norm. Thailand will accelerate an economy driven by tourism and services while the war in Ukraine leads to higher prices for fuel, food and electricity. A military and political race between China and the United States is intensifying. Winning both Beijing’s and Washington’s favor will not be an easy task going forward. – I experience that China and the United States will not understand each other. Sometimes it seems as if they misunderstand each other on purpose, says Flow. It is a somewhat unexpectedly pointed analysis from the girl who until now has mostly spoken positively and carefree about what she herself will achieve. During the conversation, it strikes me: The future of these young people is not so much about what they are to achieve or carry on their shoulders. They are about everything they have to balance. – My grandfather is Chinese. In Thailand, you can not see any road without seeing something that is Chinese, says Palm. Of the five around the table, three have Chinese grandparents. Those branches of their families came to Thailand decades and centuries before today’s global rivalry. – It is wrong that Thailand should always be neutral. I have become more aware that quite a few countries are not taking sides in the war in Ukraine, but not to stand up to the violence, that is not right, says Aurngaoey. This is their world on the way out of the pandemic. Big and small at the same time, but in both cases close. The two guys, Data and Palm, are ready for one thing. They can not stand a new shutdown. Lastly, they were rescued by private lessons. It does not happen again, says Palm. My grades will go straight down. It would be computer gaming. Regardless of whether there is more pandemic or not, there is something Thailand just has to fix, and that school system, says Aurngaoey. I’m really going to get up to go, but the five are holding me back. Saying what they had on their minds took longer than the time they spent drinking each ice cream coffee ice latte. Photo: Fang Yongbin / news This is something I have to understand, say the five young people who have all landed a place in one of the country’s best upper secondary schools. – Every year, 100,000 young people drop out of school in Thailand because they can not afford to complete, says Focus. – It is wrong that the only ones who can win the battle for education are those who can afford mobile phones, PCs, data packages and private lessons, Aurngaoey, Focus and Palm say. Then I’m allowed to go.
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They made it through the digital eye of the needle – news Urix – Foreign news and documentaries
