Education and Displacement at the Thai-Burma Border

Abstract

Having outlined the value of education in the forms of socio-cultural learning and schooling among the Karen in Burma and Thailand, this chapter turns to education in the context of the displacement of the Karen of Burma. During Burma’s 60-year-long armed conflict, the national education system was frequently used to disseminate ideologies of ethno-nationalism hence increasing marginalization of the Karen and other non-Burman communities (Sadan 2014: 70). Moreover, where Burma’s ethnic minorities live in refugee camps in Thailand, new forms of inequality between and among the refugee population, Thai government authorities and international humanitarian aid agencies are created, for example when it came to the questions of how to design culturally sensitive but internationally meaningful curricula for camp-based schools (Metro 2014: 169; Oh 2012: 96 ). In spite of this evidence, there is little education funding in conflict-affected countries. At the time of writing this book, there was still an urgent need to increase the efficiency of humanitarian aid for education, especially in areas of prolonged crises (Takyi-Amoako 2015: 4–5; UNESCO 2015b). In post-conflict settings, too, youth’s aspirations for secondary and post-secondary education are frequently neglected, especially among refugees and other exiled persons (Buckland 2006: 8).