But getting such a provision into the proposed new constitution is only half the battle won. Thai citizens must feel good to know that the state will, in theory, take good care of their children's education to make sure they grow up to be law-abiding, productive members of society. But our experience with the previous constitution tells us that the success or failure of such a lofty undertaking will be determined by how well or how poorly we as a society convert this high-sounding aspiration into practice.

Judging from past experience, the chances of things panning out in the way we envision are not very good. The idea to raise compulsory education from nine years to 12 years back in 1997 was based on the realisation that Thailand's international competitiveness had fallen below that of many other countries with comparable levels of economic and social development. It was argued that an additional three years of free schooling would lead to significant improvement in the country's human resources.

It has now been found that this is not necessarily the case. The reason is that, in its rush to meet the goal, the Education Ministry has been concentrating too much effort on the quantitative side at the expense of the quality of the education imparted. The government should have tried to improve the quality of teachers and raise administrative efficiency before taking on the challenges of ensuring equal access and quality education.

One of the biggest problems of education reform in this country is that successive governments have been preoccupied with trying to change the form, such as the institutional structures and the legal framework of education agencies, but failed miserably to change the substance, particularly the thinking and attitude of teachers. Teachers continue to languish in an outdated mindset that discourages the adoption of innovative teaching methods. This is like putting the cart before the horse.

This explains why in recent years, Thailand has invariably fared poorly in most educational quality and competitiveness rankings compared with many other countries in the region. In a recent survey, Thailand trailed behind Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and China, despite the fact that it spends a higher proportion - 5 per cent - of its gross domestic product on education than these countries. The conclusion is that Thailand still has much room for improvement in terms of education management.

The government must be reminded that no matter how much effort or additional financial resources are poured into the education system, the quality of education in this country has not shown significant improvement, simply because the Education Ministry's administrative structures continue to be dominated by the corruption-prone patronage system instead of meritocracy.

It is a pity that the CDA decided to remove an article in the proposed Constitution regarding participation of private individuals in the mobilisation of resources to help improve the quality of education. The CDA voted to reject the article in question on the grounds that its inclusion would enable unscrupulous school administrators to extort bribes or extra fees from parents in exchange for favourable treatment of admission applications. Problems such as bribery can be dealt with effectively through proper regulations and strict enforcement. The main advantage of allowing private individuals, particularly well-to-do parents, to make donations, give advice or take active roles in the running of local schools would be to make more resources available to school administrators to improve the quality of education, which would benefit everybody.