In a recent press-release the Thai Education Minister, Nataphol Teepsuwan, has met with ambassadors to foreign English-speaking countries for help in recruiting an additional 10,000 teachers for the improvement of the education system in Thailand.
This is a fair statement and I am not getting Mr Teepsuwan's case for wanting this. From what I can tell he is one of the few people in the Thai government that I can say that I actually think he is genuinely interested in helping Thai people. I think he is going to have a very tough job accomplishing this though and I say this through experience.
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I was a teacher in Thai schools on and off for about 5 years. Some of the times, especially at the beginning, I can say that I enjoyed the job and things were good. However, over the years with increased meddling on the part of the government, the various bureaucrats kept "fixing a functioning system until it was broken."
Problem 1: Crowded classrooms
The first job I had was for a grade 6 class consisting of around 20 students. In an effort to cut costs, by the time I left the system had first been changed to classrooms filled with over 40 students. The system was made even worse in the last months (and eventually lead to me leaving the profession altogether) when they reduced the number of teachers and simply made us travel to teach multiple classes, each with 40+ students.
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The amount of hours we worked remained about the same, but let me tell you difficult it is to learn the names of as well as the strengths and weaknesses of nearly 200 students. It isn't difficult: It is impossible.
Problem 2: horrible pay and no benefits
When I started teaching back in 2006 the monthly pay for a first year foreign teacher was 25,000 Baht. I checked with a friend who still teaches in the same school district I was in and found out the pay is now 28,000 Baht. A 3,000 Baht increase over the course of 14 years is outpaced by inflation. Therefore, new teachers today are actually making less than I was back then.
Getting by on 25,000 Baht was a bit of a struggle (25,000B is about $750) . Unless you lived like a pauper, you almost always ran out of money by the end of the month.
We were also not given any health insurance, or any other benefits.
We still did it anyway because it enabled us to pull down a salary and remain in this country for an extended period of time without visa hassles. However, once the job became more difficult because of "problem number 1," most of the experienced teachers moved on.
Problem number 3: The requirements keep getting more stringent
Back when i first started the requirements were that you needed to have a college degree in anything and would be assigned to a provisional teaching position that could be revoked in the first 3 months if you did not perform up to standards. What these standards were are not clearly defined but basically you had to make some progress in education of the students as defined by your work colleagues and the administration.
Fair enough right?
Over the years I have seen the list of qualifications get longer and longer. Now you need all of these things
- A TEFL certification that you pay for yourself
- You need to attend a Thai Culture course that again, you pay for yourself
- You have to apply for and receive a teaching license that again, you pay for yourself (a massive racket because the school actually arranges this and collects the fees themselves)
- Your degree needs to be in something related to education such as English, Education, Literature, or basically whatever else the local headmaster determines is appropriate.
I will admit that in the early years I worked with a bunch of teachers who had fake college degrees. I would say about half of the staff had fake credentials they had purchased on Koh Sahn Road in Bangkok. Really good fakes to be fair.
These people, by and large, were actually better educators than the people who had genuine degrees. I don't know why that is, but it just happened to be that way.
Problem number 4: Certain nationalities need not apply
This changes from time-to-time and is based on the whims of some politician that probably doesn't even speak English very well themselves.
I have seen these nations being banned from Teaching in Thailand.
- Scotland
- Ireland
- South Africa
- basically anyone who is black regardless of nationality
As far as I know the South African ban is still in effect and there is no justification for this provided.
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I'm not trying to say there are no black teachers, but I can assure you, if you are black, your chances of being hired are NOT GOOD
As far as the ban on anyone black, I can assure you this is a very real situation. I knew a guy with a Master's degree in Education, was working on his PhD online, and had worked with the F**King United Nations but he couldn't find a job. Why? It was never stated to him but it was because he was black.
In an extremely insulting encounter in Bangkok, he was offered a job.... as the sports teacher. My friend Louis weighed about 120 lbs maybe, if he was wearing a backpack and carrying a rock, had never played sports in his life, and didn't even care for sports.
There is another story here about a woman of Indian descent who had 20 years of teaching experience in Australia, who couldn't find a job at all.
Problem number 5: Every other country in this region offers MUCH better remuneration
If you teach in Vietnam, Laoe, Myannmar, Malaysia, and even extremely poor Cambodia, you are going to get a significantly better salary than you will find in Thailand. This is the reason why Thailand needs so many more teachers at the moment. Everyone who thought of this as a career moved on to countries that will pay what they are worth. No one really comes to teach in the school systems here unless they are employed by an international program and these systems make their own rules, and have excellent salaries.
There are other factors of course such as not being allowed to have a visa to actually search for the right job for you and also the rigmarole of running around collecting the mountain of paperwork and stamps necessary to actually acquire a work visa and work permit but I think that these factors are going to make the Education Minister's task of DOUBLING the amount of teachers in this country a very difficult one.
The Minister (again, who I think is a good guy with virtuous intentions) and his team are not going to succeed in this venture and like many things, it will just be swept under the rug and forgotten about.
He either needs to reduce the qualifications or increase the pay. It's really as simple as that. No one with a Masters Degree in Education is going to come work somewhere for $800 a month when they can go to Vietnam and get twice that.
Until one of these two things is accomplished, there is zero chance in my mind that they will be able to find these new teachers.