The Meritocracy Myth: National Exams and the Depoliticization of Thai Education

Thailand’s national exam, the Ordinary National Educational Test (“O-Net”), is explicitly intended to standardize education, but it has also become the producer and product of what the test writers consider ordinary knowledge in Thailand — the knowledge of the dominant class. While branches of the Ministry of Education claim to use exam results as a means of objectively measuring students’ and schools’ capacity, a closer inspection of O-Net exam questions reveals that the test perpetuates biases in the Thai education system. Through the ritual of taking the exam at the same time in the same formation, students across the country are indoctrinated into an “imagined community” and convinced of the exam’s equalizing power, with the result that the exam is spared a social critique. Thus, through an illusion of objectivity, the exam is successful in depoliticizing the preferential access to higher education enjoyed by Bangkok’s middle class and elite and in reinforcing the myth of meritocracy.