The junta trumpets free education but in reality hidden costs at schools, corruption among officials and discriminatory treatment are pushing many poor children to drop out.
By FRONTIER
Just 15 years old and excited about resuming his education, Mg Wai Yan went with an aunt on May 30 to enrol at a high school in Yangon.
But he was forced to quit within a month of the new academic year, joining the growing ranks of school dropouts because his family was unable to afford what was supposed to be free education.
The first hurdle was the need to buy textbooks, a bag and a uniform for Wai Yan from outside shops. Schools ought to provide textbooks for free, but the teachers at the school in East Hlaing Tharyar Township said they had run out of copies. They blamed the aunt, Ma Win Yamone, for enrolling the boy too late, but she insisted to Frontier that this was a lie.
A 33-year-old garment worker, Win Yamone is the breadwinner for her parents and her nephew, who was abandoned by her brother at a young age. She earns a salary of only K300,000 (about US$75 at the market rate), and could only pay for the uniform and bag.
“A set of textbooks costs K25,000. I struggle to feed my parents and my nephew with my wages. I just couldn’t afford it, so I urged my nephew to wait until the school distributed old books,” she said.
“Most buy their books new from a shop but poor students like me cannot do this, so we buy cheaper used books from older students, who sometimes also give old books as gifts,” Wai Yan said, explaining he had no such options and had to share a friend’s book in class.
The expenses didn’t stop there, despite the junta’s boasts of providing all learning materials for free. Wai Yan’s school would frequently demand small sums of money to buy items like the paper for the exams or for religious festivals. And the teachers would inflict verbal abuse and humiliating punishments on those students, like Wai Yan, who failed to pay.
“The class is constantly collecting money, for the rubbish bins or ink and paper. Recently they even collected K3,000 from each student for the Waso robe donations,” said Wai Yan, referring to gifts given to monks during Buddhist Lent, which coincides with the annual rainy season. “It’s a huge amount of money for people like us from poor families.”
Facing constant humiliation from their teachers, Wai Yan and four of his classmates in a class of 50 chose to quit school before the end of June and take on menial jobs.
“Students who can’t pay are punished by the teachers, like being forced to stand still in front of the class for hours,” said Wai Yan, who now works as a guard at the same Hlaing Tharyar garment factory that employs his aunt. “Teachers discriminated against me for not buying my own books and scolded me every day for not having enough money.”
Education interrupted
During the decade of reforms prior to the 2021 military coup, Myanmar’s economy grew quickly and the government reined in some of the hidden fees levied in schools, thereby improving school attendance rates. Now, the economy is struggling to recover from its post-coup crash while many civil servants, including teachers, left their jobs to join the Civil Disobedience Movement after the coup.
A United Nations Development Programme report published in April said that poverty rates had doubled from 24.8 percent in 2017 to 49.7pc in 2023. “The new data show that less than 25 percent of the population in Myanmar manage to secure steady incomes to live above the poverty line,” the report said.
Daw Thuzar, a mother of two girls, is outside that 25pc but she also struggles to get by in a working-class ward in Yangon’s Shwepyithar Township. When schools opened in June, she was only able to send the younger of her two daughters to school.
“My husband was fired from the construction site he was working in after the Thingyan holiday in April. My eldest daughter would have attended grade 8 this year. She used to get good grades, but we cannot afford to send both of our daughters to school at the same time. Making this decision was really hard, especially for my older daughter. She cried for many days and I was heartbroken,” she said.
The 14-year-old is working as an assistant at a pharmacy near their house, while her younger sister attends grade 2 in primary school.
Besides poverty, displacement from armed conflict is also forcing thousands of children out of school. The UN says that 3.2 million people are displaced within Myanmar, and about 40pc of them are children.
In the academic year before the pandemic, which also shuttered schools, about 9 million children were enrolled in public education, or in private and monastic schools regulated by the government. As of June 3 this year, regime data shows that only 6.27 million had registered. Enrolment in 2023 was reported at 8.1 million but only 6.7 million students were said to be still at school by the following February.
The Federation of Basic Education Worker Unions told Frontier that between 350,000 and 400,000 children have switched to resistance-run schools accredited by the National Unity Government, appointed by lawmakers ousted in the coup. Hundreds of thousands more children are believed to be in parallel ethnic education systems, but a larger number appear to have quit education entirely.
Five teachers interviewed by Frontier – one in Ayeyarwady Region, the rest in Yangon – confirmed that the dropout rate was rising in their junta-run schools. This is mainly due to economic reasons rather than displacement, because these regions remain largely free from conflict.
A grade 10 teacher in an East Hlaing Tharyar high school said her class had more than 60 students last year. Just 52 enrolled this year but three of those had already dropped out by mid-July without informing the school.
“When I phoned the parents, they told me they couldn’t afford to send their children to school anymore. Besides being sad, what can I do?” she said.
A township education department official in Ayeyarwady Region said the enrolment rate ought to be going up due to the introduction in 2023 of an extra school year, as part of education reforms launched before the coup.
“But there are fewer students this year,” he told Frontier on the condition of anonymity, adding that many more children were joining kindergarten than were finishing school at grade 12. “This shows many students haven’t returned to their classes to finish their education.”
De-funding schools
While inflation rages, regime spending on education is falling. The 2023-2024 budget allocated K2.2 trillion to the Ministry of Education, down from nearly K2.7 trillion in 2019 -2020 under the pre-coup National League for Democracy government. Frontier saw no published breakdown of ministry expenditures in the junta’s 2024-25 Union Budget, enacted on March 29.
Daw Mya Thida*, a 55-year-old teacher in Yangon with 30 years of experience, told Frontier she believed the ministry had significantly reduced the number of textbooks it was printing, and was distributing books left over from last year.
“They are slow in printing new ones and students face shortages of textbooks,” she said, noting that printing costs have risen and the ministry was struggling with reduced budgets.
Mya Thida complained that students had received free education for just a few years under the NLD government, elected in 2016. Now she said Myanmar had gone back to the bad old days, when hidden costs excluded many children from poor families.
“Under U Than Shwe parents had to buy books,” she said, referring to the leader of the last junta, from 1992 to 2011. “Under U Thein Sein it was better for the students, although the ministry was not able to provide everything for free,” she said, naming the ex-general who ran a nominally civilian government after Than Shwe. “It was with the NLD that the education sector changed significantly. Towards the end of its term it could provide free books to almost all students. Since the coup there has been no free education.”
Mya Thida said she wasn’t sure of her school’s budget, but the headmaster had told her there wasn’t the money to keep classes properly supplied.
“Before the coup the school was able to issue ink bottles whenever classrooms needed them. Now the school can only issue one bottle per class for the whole year. A bottle used to cost K3,000; now it’s K6,500,” she said.
Fewer teachers, more corruption
Teachers are also having a tough time coping with inflation on low salaries. A high school teacher earns K216,000 plus two extra monthly allowances of K30,000 each that the junta has provided to civil servants, one from last October and the other from July this year.
At the same time, they have seen their workloads increase because of understaffing. The FBEWU teachers’ union estimates that 150,000 teachers remain in the CDM, having left the state sector which used to have a workforce of more than 450,000. Regime attempts to fast-track the training of new teachers and lower standards for entry don’t appear to have plugged the gap.
Daw War War Lwin*, a high school teacher in Ayeyarwady’s Danubyu Township, said teachers have to take on extra classes as a result. “There is no time to rest because there aren’t enough teachers,” she told Frontier, adding that some have to teach four subjects, take turns on gate duty and bring school work home at night.
With staff and resources stretched so thin, long-entrenched corruption is making a big comeback, following slow but sure improvements before the coup.
War War Lwin says whenever township department officials make school inspections, the teachers have to cook lunch for them and offer fruit and snacks. The school has to pay them cash bribes, too.
“If they are not pleased with our treats, they will find mistakes in the files the school has submitted. Before they leave, the headmaster passes them envelopes containing money. That’s the way it works in this sector and we are stuck with the burden,” she said.
Ko Moe Khar, a teacher who joined the CDM and is now a leading member of the FBEWU, said such bribe-taking has been common among senior education staff for decades, but has worsened since the coup.
“The regime only focuses on suppressing CDM teachers and making students less interested in politics, so they don’t care what non-CDM teachers are doing or take action against them,” he told Frontier.
Teachers asking their students to pay for extra tuition is another entrenched practice that has intensified. Teachers often withhold vital content during regular classes to ensure students take these out-of-school classes, when they also sometimes tell them answers to exam questions in advance.
Moe Khar, the union member who also works at an online, NUG-accredited school, said teachers in the junta-run system were paying bribes to senior officials, including headmasters, to obtain the licence needed to give home tuition.
He said the abuse of the home tuition system declined when the NLD was in power but was rebounding amid the current economic crisis. Students are being threatened with bad grades if they don’t attend, he added, saying such practices mean “parents should think carefully before sending their children to junta schools”.
A mother with a daughter attending grade 5 in Yangon’s West Hlaing Tharyar Township was called by a teacher in the second week of June to ask why she had not sent her child for extra tuition as requested.
“The monthly tuition fee is K30,000 and I can’t afford it.… I told her we are poor, and she replied that my daughter would not have a good future if we didn’t invest in her education,” she said, requesting not to publish her name.
“After that, my child was constantly asked questions in the class, and she was ridiculed and punished if she couldn’t answer them. She grew afraid of going to school and finally refused to go.”
The mother went to talk to the headmaster, who transferred the girl to another class. But no action was taken against the teacher, she said.
*indicates the use of a pseudonym for security reasons
