Ba Win, from Bard College in upstate New York, delivered a neat speech to a plenary session of last week’s Social Science Curriculum Working Group Meeting. I particularly liked the description he gave of a young Burmese student travelling to the US, as he did in 1965, and being required to think independently. It reminded me of a passage in Pascal Khoo Thwe’s brilliant memoir, From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey. Transposed from Burma to Thailand and then to Cambridge in 1991, the author confronted many difficulties. Above all, he faced Ba Win’s challenge. This is how he puts it (p.275):

“The hardest thing, though, was the very idea of forming my own opinion. In my first term I was reading Renaissance English literature, including Spenser, Milton and Donne. Not only was I expected to master these texts – difficult for me both in their language and in their historical and religious background – but I had also to come to a personal point of view on them. Nothing could have been more opposed to the whole pattern of my previous education, and the thought of writing essays on my own was as frightening to me as the experience of defusing a landmine.”

Fortunately for future generations of elite Myanmar students, help is at hand. Bard’s Language and Thinking Program, an intensive three-week pre-collegiate programme created in 1981, will be brought to UY and MU in time for the December 2014 cohorts. The intention is to make this a standard part of student induction on both campuses. Focused on writing across a wide range of genres, it embodies an approach Ba Win termed thinking by writing. In the long run, this could be one of the most important university reforms made in contemporary Myanmar.