59-05-032 Proceeding

9 Proceedings of the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Congress improvement opportunity processes and infrastructure development, between urban and rural Thailand; which is heavily biased in favour of urban areas, especially those in close proximity to Bangkok. City politics is always stronger than rural politics. Education Reform As a teacher myself, I believe it fair to say that the current Thai education paradigm is failingThai society and needs urgent reformas a top national priority. Not somuch the hardware of education (the physical infrastructure), but the software (the curriculumand teaching and learning paradigm).Thatmeans an immediate upgrade of theThai formal and non-formal education systems to encompass transformative education paradigms, as envisaged for Health Professional Education Reform cited in The Lancet Commission Report 2010 3 . The Lancet Commission’s report, although mainly focused on education of health professionals, it has major implications for education in general. The Report recognizes that professional education, including professional health education, did not keep up with the rapidly changing world and the challenges of the 20 th century and is now not placed to overcome the new challenges of the 21 st century without drastic reform of education, worldwide; contemporary education systems are fragmented, outdated, with static curricular that produces ill-equipped graduates. The main education thrust has been, and still is, to preserve the status quo of the turf of the institutions and authorities concerned with the continuity of their silos of power; but not limited only to, health, education, and the law. The problems in contemporary education paradigms are widely considered to be systemic. A mismatch of competencies to population needs; poor teamwork; quantitative and qualitative imbalances in the professional labour market; and less than efficient effective leadership to improve system performance are just some of the issues highlighted. TheCommission’s Report finishes offby advocating embracing a third generationof systems- based reforms of instruction and education based on transformative learning and interdependence in education for advancing equity around the world. Transformative learning is at the highest level of three associated levels of learning: 1. Informative learning is the base level of learning with an objective to attain knowledge and skills; its outcome is production of experts. 2. Formative learning, the second level, concerns socialising students through instilling values; its outcome is to generate professionals. 3. Transformative learning concerns developing leadership characteristics; the objective being to produce enlightened change agents. 3 Lancet: Global Commission on Education of Health Professionals for the 21 st Century was published online on 29 November 2010 in the Lancet.