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Published on April 1, 2008

Further, there doesn't seem to be any recognition of the need or benefit of continuing education. If you want an education, you must leave family and friends and move to the city when you graduate from high school. Miss this window and you will never get an education.

Continuing education or night school allows people to get, not only high school diplomas and vocational training, but a few college courses a semester which they can transfer to a university toward a degree. And because the system uses empty high school classrooms, there are no new buildings to pay for.

I think if there's one thing that the government (at all levels) ought to be doing to break the cycle of poverty both in the countryside and in big cities it is to foster a system of continuing education.

There is a polarity in Thailand between the big cities and the agricultural countryside. The disparity in educational opportunities between the two areas feeds into this troubling polarity.

Forrest Greenwood

Nakhon Sawan

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TPBS programming enough to drive a man to not drink

What is it with TPBS anyway? All it does is repeatedly show documentary films from Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel and Animal Planet. The audience already knows how elephants mate. They are sick of watching lions drag down a wild buffalo and tear it up.

They've seen the same owl swoop down on the same mouse and gobble it up head first with its little tail dangling out a hundred times. I have even memorised every word the narrator says. Is this all Thepchai Yong can manage with a Bt2 billion a year budget coming from sin tax? I'd better quit smoking and drinking.

Somsak Pola

Samut Prakan

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Token moves not enough to reverse harm of FBA

Re: "Govt opens the door to more foreign investors" News, March 31.

While any moves to liberalise the Foreign Business Act (FBA) are welcome, it is a pity that the new government appears only willing to make some token amendments to Thailand's archaic law on foreign investment that was originally introduced by a repressive military dictatorship in 1972.

What Thailand really needs is a brand new foreign investment code to bring the country into the 21st century and enable it to compete more effectively against its formidable new competitors in Asia.

As a first step, the government should, at the very least, completely rejig Annex 3 of the FBA to remove the blanket prohibition on foreign companies investing in the service sector. In this way they could simply specify service industries they believe still merit protection and any unnamed service industries could be automatically exempted without any palaver of applying for an alien business licence or similar nonsense.

George Morgan

Chon Buri

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