Harry Nicolaides' Weekly Column

Exclusively for Phuket-Info.com

I came, I taught, I conquered

The profession of teaching English abroad attracts the most odd assortment of characters. The flotsam and jetsam of Western civilisation, these ne’er-do-wells wash up on the shoreline of the Third World looking to reinvent themselves like the Count of Monte Cristo or to champion the a cause celebre like Lawrence of Arabia. Many are undischarged bankrupts fleeing creditors, fugitives from justice, unemployed mercenaries, disgraced or convicted malcontents, missionaries, writers-at-large, delinquent and errant husbands, asylum-seekers - and those recently discharged from mental asylums, crusaders and occasionally teachers – with fake university degrees, of course. This is the state of the industry throughout South America, Polynesia and South East Asia. If you are a foreign teacher in Thailand, you are likely to find yourself sharing an office with Hannibal Lector.

English for these wayfarers is their native tongue. Consequently they drift into the educational system as a means of earning an income but find themselves doing a lot more. In the past missionaries and aid workers were discovered looting national treasures, excavating and smuggling archaeological artefacts, exploiting the indigenous population or establishing private kingdoms with themselves as the self-appointed monarch. During times of military conflict some were commissioned as intelligence operatives or became correspondents from besieged cities or nations erupting in civil unrest. Today, with an absence of such interesting opportunities, English language teachers abroad have to wage their own war against professional colleagues, exert their own petty tyrannies, explore a malignant neuroses, indulge a private obsession or simply experience the full dress rehearsal of a sordid sexual fetish.

There are some entrepreneurial teachers like the eccentric Englishman working at a Saudi university who, by a smuggler’s moon, makes midnight runs to the border in his Rolls Royce Silver Spirit. His purpose is to collect hundreds of bottles of liqueur and then return furiously across the desert through biblical-sized sandstorms. His illegal cache is distributed judiciously to the underground gin joints that exist in the sprawling catacombs underneath the capital. By day this English teacher is impeccably tailored in Saville-Row finery, has the finesse of a high-class courtesan and the roguish charm of a young Errol Flynn. He is a dashing, dissolute and debauched character whose moral turpitude is 100 per cent proof. His lessons in teaching prepositions of time and place– ‘on’ Friday night, ‘at’ midnight, ‘in’ the desert – are always profitable.

While self-aggrandisement is a common avocation for ex-patriate teachers, private obsessions can be more nefarious. There is teacher in a Thailand university who, renouncing his Mormon past, has set out to protect students from ‘the tyranny of democracy’. His heart pines for the small minorities in democratic models of political organisation, who are marginalised by the majority. He characterises Western culture as imperialistic and believes he has been divinely ordained – his birthdate is the same as the enactment date of the Educational Reform Act of Thailand - to protect Thai students from the homogenising influences of the free market and mass media communications. His teaching methodology is Machiavellian. It is believed his agenda is to baptise all of his students by the end of the academic year. When dozens of students fell into the lake during the recent Lo Kratong festival in Phuket foul play was suspected. Students are also manipulated into actually working hard and are brainwashed into believing that they can become independently minded autonomous, lifelong learners.

There is the American, former prison guard and Arizona patrolman who now teaches in Turkey. While working in Thailand he started to exhibit repressed aggression towards his professional colleagues. He experienced violent outbursts and confrontations about minor infractions of university regulations by students. He became obsessed with thwarting students from gaining unfair advantage by cheating and spent hundreds of hours devising examinations that would challenge the ingenuity of students to anticipate the content of examination papers. When a small cluster of student papers were found to have similar results he launched a major investigation into the unlikely correlation. He conducted a thorough statistical analysis of the results involving averages, probability and distribution graphs and was encouraged by the evidence of poor students performing as well as high-calibre students. Remarking all 250 exam papers he concluded that a group of students must have stolen an exam paper prior to the exam day. He insisted, against the judgement of other teachers, to hold the exam again. His paranoia had resonances of the deranged ship captain, Captain Queeg, in the film The Caine Mutiny. The results in the second examination were the same. Well why wouldn’t they be? The students cheated again.

The process of screening applicants for teaching appointments abroad is open to abuse, misunderstanding and identity fraud. Going overseas to work is a convenient way escape the indiscretions and convictions of a former life in the West. There is a burgeoning demand for native English speakers to teach English in educational institutions at all levels across Thailand. The interview and selection process is the responsibility of non-native speakers and so anyone who looks like a teacher in what is largely a presentation culture is assured of employment. While it well known that fake university and college degrees may be bought in Bangkok there have been other, more elaborate deceptions that are breathtaking in their audacity. Consider the case of the convicted paedophile who secured an appointment at a school in Thailand. He presented his students with a class project where each of them had to develop a photographic portfolio featuring themselves. When students complained of not having an adequate stock of photos he naturally volunteered to take pictures of them at home, the beach or in a sunken, concrete-walled bunker, six-feet under the ground, accessible only by a secret trapdoor in the basement of his home. He fled to a neighbouring country with no standing extradition treaty and continues accumulating photos for his magnum opus – Venus descending.

It is rumoured that the Central Intelligence Agency is using the educational system in Thailand to extinguish the resurgence of religious fundamentalism in the South. Muslim extremists present a danger to the expansion of American foreign policy in the southeast Asian region. The American administration has operatives in schools and universities and in quasi-government organisations. Their objective is to influence the direction and content of curriculums and courses to include academic content that promotes acquiescence and rapacious consumerism. This appetite for Western products has developed into a cargo cult of consumption with only the vested interests of American businesses are being served at the expense of cultural diversity and heritage.

A teacher at a prominent university in Phuket revealed a hidden agenda when he insisted on developing a learner-centred model of teaching with his Thai students. What appeared to be a progressive step in introducing fashionable teaching methodologies in a country atrophied by arcane structures of learning was in fact a diabolical strategy to manipulate students into believing they are making a free, independent decision when they make a choice between two competing brands – or ideologies. It’s a false choice of course as they are only given a limited, controlled selection and misled into believing they are exercising freedom of choice. Moreover, in what is an insidious incarnation of Orwellian prophecy students are nurtured to desire the new-fangled American dream that ensures that the American economy grows while the Thai Baht languishes in ignominy. Education is so inextricably intertwined with global economics and the hegemonic influences of the mass media that it has been hijacked to advance the interests of American imperialism in the New World order.

Sex tourists, spies and sado-masochists. These are the undesirables that are now teaching in schools and colleges from Bangladesh to Bahrain, Mombasa to Marrrakesh, Penang to Puerto Rico, Bombay to Buenos Aires. Delivering object lessons in treachery, exploitation, psychological manipulation, their skulduggery has spread to infest almost every Third world rat hole. Are they teachers or tailors of chaos? Perhaps we should be careful to remember the words of Tom Hyde, when, standing on the gallows moments before he was hung, he was asked to state his last words – he said: “ Tell the tailors to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch”.

Harry Nicolaides
December 04

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