Laos Education

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Lao Educational Opportunities Trust

Registered Charity Number: 1115944

The following is abstracted from a recent UNESCO report into education in the Mekong region.

Historical Background

Traditional education in Laos (and most of the Mekong region) centred on the Theravada Buddhist monastery. Monastic education appears to have become widespread in the region between 11th – 15th Centuries, the time when Theravada Buddhist spread from Sri Lanka into mainland SE Asia.

Apart from those areas populated by non-Buddhist ethnic groups, almost every village had a monastery that served as the social, religious and educational centre of the community. In addition to offering males the opportunity to pursue a life of renunciation in the monkhood, the monastery provided boys and young men with the opportunity to acquire basic numeracy, literacy and the basic principles of Buddhism.

It is possible that half of the males in the region in the 18th Century did so through the offices of the monastery.

In the larger monasteries under royal patronage, males with exceptional talent or ambition could seek advanced instruction with monks in a range of subjects derived from India, such as maths, astronomy, medicine and poetry. Such monasteries could afford to support paid lay teachers. Monastic education was free, but with the exception of those under royal patronage they were constructed and maintained by the local community, and donations to the monastery were seen as a means of accumulating a store of merit.

Although Pali was the formal language of instruction in the monastery, vernacular languages were also used and outside of the monastery vernacular languages were the primary means of transmitting Buddhist teachings to the non literate population, including women and girls. Although Theravada Buddhism did not explicitly bar women from pursuing a religious education, culturally prescribed gender roles generally excluded females from attending monastic schools. Non-Buddhist ethnic groups were also excluded, in part by their geographic distance from monasteries, as well as their religious beliefs. These disparities in educational provision, although reducing, can still be measured today.

Current Situation

Today Primary education in Laos formally comprises 5 years and is compulsory and free. Secondary education comprises a further 3 years, as does “upper secondary” education. Plans are afoot to increase the secondary phase to 4 years.

Between 1991 and 2005 Laos saw a rapid expansion of primary education. In the face of falling fertility rates, enrolments increased by 25% with substantial progress being made towards gender parity. The increase in the proportion of students (and teachers) from disadvantaged ethnic groups was even more marked and accounted for a major part of the overall increase. Nevertheless some children in remote areas lack access to schooling and some families still consider it better for children to work rather than attending school. Where long distance travel is involved in getting to school, girls are much more likely than boys to be kept at home to work.

September 2010 Update

Big changes in the funding of Higher Education in Laos have just been announced. For the moment they are only given in outline form so we are unsure how LEOT will be affected by them.

At present, some 30 % of students are admitted following the entrance exam without payment of fees, while the other 70% are admitted to fee paying special courses. In future all students will pay fees and the so called special courses will be discontinued. We assume that in the simplest sense this represents a unifying and simplifying of the system and the end of the binary line between fee payers and non payers. Certainly, the existing system was rife for corruption, although whether the new system can eradicate that we cannot forecast.