[55TRATTERENRY]

Redbird_Lefty got me thinking about schools. Pear started the primary question, "Do they teach equality in Thai schools?" This is not a direct yes or no. It is a memory of my school time that has remained with me so vividly, and I think it makes a good example of how "equality" is not taught as a subject material, but taught through a teacher's expectation.

It was the first of my two years in Daddarunee Girl's School, Chachoengsao, 1979.
I was in MS1, equivalent to Grade 7. A physics teacher was substituting our regular geometry teacher who was absent for a while. He had given us homework about the qualities of triangles and called for our homework notebooks. This physics teacher (who usually taught the senior classes) confronted my 7th grader classmates in a very strong way, that he could see from the handed in work that some people had been copying their homework rather than doing it themselves. He picked one girl and told her that if she pointed out who she copied from, he would spare hitting her (in those days, this was acceptable). She pointed someone. He kept asking the next girl with the same threat until there was an increasing number of girls standing up guilty of the crime of copying. I had given my notebook that morning to a friend to help her out because she didn't understand the lesson and therefore couldn't do the homework. It turned out that she had passed it on to many others. Seeing so many of my classmates, doomed for punishment, I started to feel really bad about letting my work be copied, so I stood up and told him that I was the source. Then he gave me this very nasty lecture about how I was doing more harm to my friends by feeling sorry for them and letting them copy my work than having them do their own work, etc, etc. I had never been criticized so harshly, it really hurt. Half way through his tirade, I was sobbing into my desk. He sent me out of the room, continued his class. After class, he had a talk with me (in a more gentle manner), and made sure I understood the harm of helping others the easy way.

Through my later years in school, there have been other episodes in other schools, (due to my father's work, we moved about every two years), where my classmates tried to do things the easy way. Being part of the class, I could not be totally innocent. Sometimes, the situation called for me to pass my work around to help others again, despite the risk of being found out and punished. I remember, an exam in Grade 11. The teacher stepped out of the room for a while, and there were small balls of paper flying around in so many directions, it was so hilarious. Even when she stepped back in we were all trying to contain our giggles. Later in university, I would occasionally hear announcements about such and such students being flunked, and even expelled for being caught cheating. Now some twenty years later, I listen to my son's stories about how the A-students in his class copy their work from textbooks, prepared notes, etc, and the teacher picking on students like him who don't behave in class, and does sloppy work, but actually tries to do his own stuff.

OK, so what does cheating in schools have to do with teaching of equality? Looking back, I understand now that that physics teacher upheld high moral standards for education. He probably expected all of his students to have the same ability to understand the relationships of angles if they only worked at it hard enough. He actually expected more out of us as a weak class than our regular math teacher who accepted lower than standard work. During that substitution period, I think, the class learnt more about angles and some other serious life lessons. For me? I took to heart the subtle subconscious message that equality meant leaving behind friends who couldn't take the opportunity to be as "equal". And yet I rebel against that lesson to this day, because through life I have seen how each person is so different from another and responds to similar situations differently. I see it most in the differences of my two children. Because they are so different, how could I treat them equally? What is equal for both could give one of them advantage over the other, put the other at a disadvantage, or even be a disadvantage for both of them.