Cultural capital disappearing too

It's not an unusual phenomenon any more in today's Thailand that a large number of farmers' children don't know how to farm. The learning process of farming had been gradually overshadowed by another type of education and was now totally replaced.

The learning process of farmers started with helping older siblings looking after buffaloes; searching for crickets and other edible insects; catching fish; picking up vegetables in the rice fields; learning about natures of the fields, water sources, soil, as well as animals and plants. Such knowledge would benefit farmers' livelihood. Also, there were other aspects - apart from farming techniques - to learn from one's own family about farmer's way of living. Without these types of knowledge, you couldn't live a farmer's life.

Sad to say, this learning process was replaced by modern school system which does not aim to carry on producing farmers, but to produce professionals, industrial workers, bureaucrats etc.

When the school system was first introduced, schools holidays were arranged in accordance with farming season. Later on, the new education system has become more dominant and completely taken the place of the learning process of farmers' children. Some fragments of traditional beliefs and values may be cherished among farming families. But without real-life base and other supportive knowledge, these beliefs and values have become too obsolete. To teach people to live a frugal life like farmers while there are plenty of worldly things to possess is ridiculous!

Therefore, the cultural capital - needed by present day Thai people - to take up small-scale family farming already disappeared a long time ago....