Early Childhood Indicators and the Bureaucratic Frame

Earlier I saw a post about the 2025 early childhood education curriculum for children aged 3 to 6, and I only recently had the chance to read it in detail.

First of all, I won’t get into the issue of expressing love for the nation and so on, because it’s quite subjective. What caught my eye more was the setting of detailed year-by-year “behavioral indicators”, for example, a 3-year-old must stop and stand when hearing the national anthem, and a 5-year-old must be able to sing the Thai national anthem, stand at attention, and express love for the nation appropriately.

The question is: can we really specify behavioral goals related to child development in this much detail? Or are we applying a bureaucratic frame of thinking to small children too much?

In biology and psychology, young children develop differently from one individual to the next. Some children may speak fluently early, and others may not yet dare to make eye contact with adults. Setting “must be able to” indicators year by year, such as drawing a straight triangle or displaying patriotic behavior in the same way, ignores the nature of human development.

In countries like Singapore or Finland, early childhood education emphasizes “life skills through play,” not item-by-item assessment. Teachers have the freedom to observe and support each child’s growth in their own way, rather than measuring “pass” or “fail.”

So why does Thailand still cling to such strict indicators? From my experience, I guess that part of the reason is that the Thai bureaucracy is used to concrete measurement, with results in scores that can be reported back to the center.

The idea of indicators (KPIs) in the public sector is often tied to evaluation, budget disbursement, and ranking the success of policies.

So a 3-year-old having to “be able to do this” is not only for assessing the child’s development. It also becomes evidence of the success of the school, the administrators, and, one step further, the ministry.

A system that emphasizes paperwork more than children may be harming children unintentionally. A child who can’t yet meet an indicator may be seen as “slow” when they simply need time. Teachers get tired too, from teaching so that “children can do item number such-and-such” rather than for real development.

And overall, we may be producing “children who follow well,” but not “children who grow up secure and happy.”

What can we do? The suggestions below come from my own experience. I’ve been in the bureaucratic system for a while and I understand that these rules are very hard to change, but at least I’d like to leave them for us to think about further.

• Reduce the granularity of indicators for ages 3 to 6.
• Change from “reporting numbers” to “recording each child’s growth.”
• Prioritize space for building relationships between teachers and children over checking.
• Communicate to parents that “children don’t have to be the same” to ease the pressure.

The future of the country doesn’t lie in who can answer fastest at age 5, but in who still wants to learn when they grow up.