Firsthand Experience of Education in Myanmar (Burma)

Though what I encountered on my first exposure to the Myanmar public education system that my father was born into wasn’t unanticipated, the dire seriousness of the problems shocked me regardless. Corruption manifested itself in the poor funding and more detrimentally arbitrary allocation of resources. As a result, teachers often taught multiple subjects, even spanning across STEM and history, leaving families little choice but to pay for private tutoring lessons. This is apparently the only time real ‘learning’ happened, a privilege only enjoyed by those who can afford it and a reality that the wealthy private schools were exempt from.

My trip to Burma was thus disheartening, but insightful. So instead of returning to more examples of the same, I decided to visit a Buddhist monastery where volunteers chose to donate money, books and monks gave their time. The conditions were just as destitute, if not worse, than what was still afresh in my mind: creaky chairs rotting away at the already tattered wood, air conditioning units that had been unoperational for decades and lightbulbs now opaque from the dust they had collected. Needless to say, there was no internet, computers, equipment or any sign of technology from this millennium that could be found.

Encouragingly though, the teachers weren’t trained at all, but were highly motivated for the success of the students they had committed to with all their heart. For them, they did all they could to help students pass not only the exam, but leap over this first (and hopefully last) hurdle that life and society had imposed upon them. But all they could offer was reciting from the government issued textbooks together with the students, some of whom lacked foundational literacy and numeracy to even learn. Their desperation was and still is very understandable.

‘Did the students themselves seem motivated to learn? Did they feel like coming to class on any given day? Did they even believe they had a future, and if so, what ‘future’ would that be?’

In pursuit of questions I couldn’t dare to ask directly, I decided to conduct a survey with the students in order to objectively understand and evaluate the issue from their perspective. Dozens of interviews and probing questions finally arrived at a destination: all of my doubts were confirmed, but a feasible, sustainable solution was still nowhere in sight.