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ASIAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
THE PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATIONEDUCATION IN THAILANDUthai Laohavichien
For more than two decades, Thailand has given top priority to thedevelopment of the country. The government has paid attention to theFollowing goals: eradication of poverty and unemployment; a moreequitable distribution of income; improvement in the quality of life;equity in a political system that encourages popular participation; anddefence against internal and external threats. The above objectives andgoals must inevitably call for government officials equipped with desirabledevelopmental attributes which can be put into practice. Thus, a publicadministration education programme in line with these specifications isneeded.As in most less developed countries (LDCs), public administrationeducation in Thailand has confronted several problems. Aside from theinadequacies of qualified teaching staff, indigenous materials, and teachingtechnologies, most curricula of public administration are not conducive tothe values, needs and the resources of the country. As can be seen in thelater part of this paper, most current curricula are patterned on Western orAmerican public administration models which are largely irrelevant toThailand. In addition, in order to transfer a public administiation educationprogramme from a more advanced country to a LDC, one must be aware ofmany problems such as the question of universality, value neutrality, and theserious consideration of what can be transferred and what cannot betransferred. Moreover, scholars in many LDCs, including those in Thailand,are increasingly interested in the development of public administrationeducation programmes which are suited to the needs and values of eachcountry instead of merely adopting or importing an entire programmefrom the West.This paper is therefore an attempt to point out the problems ofcontemporary public administration education in Thailand and its futuredirection. Accordingly, effort will be made to describe publicadministration education in Thailand tracing back from the time of KingChulalongkom who ruled in the late 1890's to the present time. Thistreatment of the historical development of Thai public administrationeducation will serve as a basis for the discussion of its problems andprospects.
Uthai Laohavichien is Associate Professor at the National Institute ofDevelopment Administration, Bangkok, Thailand.
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ASIAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
The Development of Public Administration Education in Thailand
The development of public administration education in Thailand can betreated in five stages.
1.
The combination of Public Law and the British Tradition
Public administration education in Thailand dates back to the time ofKing Chulalongkorn who, in 1899, instigated the establishment of variouseducational institutions to train Thais and to meet the increasing demandsof the public service. They are the Civil Servant School, the Royal PagesSchool, the Civil Servant School of King Chulalongkorn, and the Facultyof Public Administration and Law of Chulalongkorn University. All ofthese higher educational institutions were designed primarily to trainyoung men to serve in the public service. In 1899, the Civil ServantSchool was founded to train middle-level and clerical personnel for thepublic service. It was later replaced by the Royal Pages School which wasdesigned to familiarize government officials with court customs beforethey were assigned to posts in the provinces. The school also trained itsstudents to behave as gentlemen, to learn Thai customs and goodmanners.
1
Students had to spend a period working under the directsupervision of the King, which enabled him to form judgments on his menbefore they were assigned to posts in the provinces.
2
In 1910 the RoyalPages School was renamed the Civil Servant School of King Chulalongkornand was later transformed into Chulalongkorn University in 1917.
3
At theoutset, Chulalongkorn University established four new faculties with theFaculty of Public Administration and Law as
one
of them.
4
The primaryobjective of this faculty was to train government officials as deputydistrict officers, a starting position in a hierarchy which included suchposts as governor and directors-general and culminated with the positionof undersecretary of the ministry. The curricula of these schools were acombination of general administration, field training, humanities, policy,law, local government, political science and other social science courses.The courses offered in these schools were broad and general in nature. Theteaching of public administration, however, reflected a legalistic bias. Theprevailing notion was that a competent government official must have agood background in law because law was regarded as essential to theunderstanding of public administration. Besides, a good governmentofficial, it was believed, must be a broad-minded person. This is in line
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ASIAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATIONwith the British tradition which favoured persons with a liberal artseducation background rather than with a management background.In 1948 and 1949, two new B.A. degrees in political science wereoffered at Chulalongkom and Thammasat Universities respectively.
5
Similar to their predecessors, the primary purpose of both programmeswas to train graduates who would serve in the Ministry of Interior asdeputy district officers. Both programmes offered a combination ofcourses in political science, law, public administration, and other socialsciences. Again the major emphasis was on law and hence the legalisticbias persisted.From the above description, it might be suggested that publicadministration education in Thailand in its initial stages followed the"public law" tradition, as manifested in France, Germany and othercountries on the continent, as well as the "broad-based or generaleducation" approach of Britain. Such curricula combined political science,public administration, law, and other social sciences and the mainapproach of public administration was legalistic, philosophical, andhistorical. Needless to say, the "administrative science" and "socialscience" perspectives on the study of public administration were yet tomake an impact. Consequently, Thai graduates in public administration inthat era were well-versed in law, but had narrow perspectives ofadministrative problems and tended to rely on their legalistic training tocope with such problems. The prevailing belief in that generation was thatadministrative problems could be remedied by drafting proper laws andregulations.
2.
The "Core Beliefs" Tradition
After World War II, with the rise of behaviouralism and the increasinginvolvement of the United States in many LDCs, public administrationeducation in Thailand in turn underwent a shift in emphasis to follow theAmerican line of thinking.It must be noted here that the state of the art of American publicadministration at this period was in a state of confusion. The "politics/administration dichotomy" and "principles of administration" paradigmscame under severe attack from, among others, Herbert Simon, DwightWaldo and Robert A. Dahl. For instance, Simon pointed out that the"principles" of administration advanced by the classical theorists weremerely "proverbs" both in that they were only loosely worded maxims oradmonitions and in that if they were placed in pairs, they wouldcontradict each other.
6
Thus, these "principles of administration" couldnot be treated as a scientific study of administration. Simon's approach to
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