Bangkok Post, Thailand, Kriengsak Niratpattanasai Column.

Byline: Kriengsak Niratpattanasai

Aug. 1--Last week, I facilitated a two-day workshop on continuous learning for senior management of a multinational company. In the opening session, each participant was asked to identify the hero of continuous learning. Many identified their own fathers who had immigrated from China.

They admired these "heroes" for several reasons. They came to Thailand with nothing. They started to work mostly as labourers since they did not have any education and spoke no Thai. Through continuous learning and 15-20 years of hard work, the majority of them became middle-class in Thailand.

I asked why those people were continuous learners. The responses were: they wanted to be successful; they knew that learning was critical, particularly for those who had no qualifications; they realised that if they wanted to have more they need to learn more and they wanted to escape from poverty.

What happened to the peers of those Chinese immigrants 20 years later? The majority of them are still labourers. Some were promoted slightly to foreman or supervisor. What's interesting is that their children now are employed at the companies of the sons of those Chinese immigrants. Continuous learning has a payoff for more than one generation.

But do Thai people care about continuous learning? According to an article in the Bangkok Post on March 20, 2003: "Unesco reported that Thais on average read eight lines of a book in one year, the National Statistics Office found children aged 10 years or older spent less than three minutes reading in a year." According to Post Today: "Prime Minister Thaksin reads four books per month on the average. When he was not the PM, he read six books per month."

Author Jack Canfield wrote in The Aladdin Factor: "You read a new book per week, which means you read 52 new books per year. That's how you know more that the others."