© 1989 by Oxford University Press
Field Report |
Reclaiming a Shattered Past: Education for the Displaced Khmer in Thailand
Khmer Studies Institute, Connecticut USA
This paper addresses the education efforts and needs of the 320, 000 displaced Khmer people living in encampments along the Thai-Cambodian border. It also raises some issues for the future of education in a non-Communist Cambodia. The displaced Khmer, more than half of whom are under 16 years of age, have been interned in the border camps since 1979 awaiting repatriation to Cambodia pending a political settlement This report on their education problems is based in part on a month-long study trip to Thailand and the three major border camps in January 1989. It raises the question of what an appropriate education is for a people earmarked to return to a country whose urban population has never exceeded 15 per cent and is currently between 6 and 7 per cent; who possess backgrounds largely in wet-rice farming, but also civil service, small-scale manufacturing, artisanry, and fishing; and whose strong traditional belief system combines Buddhism with various Hindu and animistic practices An appreciation of this question, complicated by the needs and demands of modernization, requires some prior understanding of the socio-cultural context of education in Cambodia.