Let's Study and Die!

 

“We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.”

― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

I believe it was just yesterday I said, "It seems like the whole world is busy turning all the schools into hagwons." I don't know how many times I've said it but two of the educational patterns I've seen in my travels throughout Asia are the abject commercialization of education that has become the norm in Asia and the adoption of this backward strategy by the west. And I'm not even sure of the timeline. Maybe this began in the west and was copied by Asia. I'm just writing about the order in which I experienced it. 

For those who don't know, a hagwon is an institution designed to appear educational but if it is, it is only through happenstance. They are businesses where the bottom line is profit. The average hagwon owner has little to no concern for education. Sometimes workers are hired who actually ARE educators and, despite and often against the wills and wishes of the owners, the customers get what they pay for, but it's a crap shoot. Quite a while ago, I worked at a hagwon where the owners, a Korean couple, proudly hung their master's degrees in education from New Zealand on the wall of the institute in which they violated everything they would have learned in a Kiwi M.Ed. program if they had even ever been there at all. 

I feel like full disclosure is now safe enough for me. So I'm here to say that the place I worked in Canada most recently was the same. It seemed like almost every staff meeting, and they were frequent, one or two of the people in charge would read the teachers their resumes assuring us that they had master's degrees in education from the University of Calgary (if they had ever been there at all) before getting into the finances of the business disguised as a school where we worked and outlining standardization, strict regulations, micromanagement, passive, grammar-based, teacher-centered philosophy that SURELY the U of C education program would have taught them was ANTI-education. Just before I left they announced that all the classes, which already had numbers a bit high for proper education, would have more students added (with no extra money for teachers) and that they were thinking of experimenting with standardized testing. This made me ecstatic that I had chosen to leave because it would only add to the already toxic and paranoid atmosphere.

It begins with the core "teachers." I enclose the word in quotation marks because few of them still teach and I have doubts whether any of these businesspeople ever did. They are all Chinese and all make very good money running what to the naked eye seems to be a proper school that is based on the compassion that Hedges describes as the root of a good society since the people allegedly being educated therein are people from disadvantaged, violent, and often refugee backgrounds. What a wonderful use of tax dollars, right? It might have been at one point but here's what the Chinese management has transformed it into: They only have a small core of management/teachers who work full time. The majority of the staff are hired on a part-time basis for several reasons. First, you don't need to pay part-time workers benefits. No health insurance, dental, and whatever else the small core of full-timers get. Their jobs are very nice and I'm sure the benefit packages they receive are highly enviable to Canadian workers let alone workers from less developed countries which make up the vast majority. So the prize to keep your eyes on is established early. They let us know how lucrative our jobs could become if we get promoted to full time status. What they don't let us know is that's never gonna happen. Oh they'll tell us that they started out as part-time teachers but that could be just as phony a story as their education degrees.

Secondly, and I saw this at every business I witnessed in China, the idea of community, once the cornerstone of communist Chinese values, is frowned upon and competition is created amongst the teachers like a fucking used car lot. Instead of sales as our measure we had the ongoing stressor of performance evaluations hanging over our heads like guillotine blades. The prospect of good performance evaluations was made more relevant with their relation to the prospect of more hours and ultimately full-time work. What, you might ask, are the criteria upon which the teachers' performance is evaluated? It probably isn't what you think. One good example might be whether students learn, their English improves and it helps them "succeed" in Canadian society. I use the ever-serviceable quotation marks again in deference to the Chris Hedges quotation since learning to speak English better WOULD be the improvement of minds, not careers. So did the Calgary CFN give half a hunk of shit about improving minds? I don't think so. But they DID want each teacher to write what they called "success" stories about a student or two they worked with. How English improvement led to "success" in Canadian society. Because they were concerned about social and intellectual improvement? Hell no! They wanted these stories for one reason - they look really great in a government funding proposal. 

Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada - the IRCC as it is always called at my acronym and abbreviation-loving former place of employment - is the major funder for the language institute called the Centre for Newcomers in Calgary. Things like waitlists and increased immigration also tend to help funding. To give you some idea of the place, here is an article about funding cuts from 2023. The funding has dramatically increased since then but the waitlists have also. I don't recognize any of the names in the article or the people in the picture. I DO recognize the meeting room and the long faces of the people in it, however. Why are they looking so job-dissatisfied? Because they're all under the agita of job-performance evaluation. Also, they're part-timers with other jobs who are desperately trying to find a "success story" from the students they teach to write a glowing report about to enhance their job performance rating and improve their chances of getting the ultimate carrot for all us donkey teachers: a full-time position with full benefits. They get so stressed out that they might even go so far as to embellish, exaggerate, or even completely fabricate "success stories." As long as funders like the IRCC buy the stories, they are as good as gold and need not be verified.

Doing what you're told by people in management even if it contradicts all educational wisdom or common sense - also good for performance evaluations. There are all kinds of reports we write in which we relate to management what we are teaching and doing in the classroom. Good ideas like guest speakers and field trips will probably help performance evaluation. I don't know if actual content and solid educational philosophy does though. Not complaining is a big one. Especially since those in charge are educationally dysfunctional and the technology used - software and hardware both - could be much better. This can and DOES lead to subterfuge. I can't tell you how many times I went into my classroom and the settings on my computer were messed with, smartboard cords were unplugged, or some other attempt at making my job harder and making me look like I have lots of problems while others do not, or other such sabotage was attempted. Normally I was able to unfuck what had been purposely fucked up. My tech skills are pretty good since I lived and worked in Korea for a long time. It also helped that I went to work at least two hours early every shift. This gave me time to diffuse the sabotage. Oh and btw, going in to work 2 hours early for every shift - NOT something that is a plus on your performance evaluations.

It is improper for a Canadian to say anything like this but ipso facto Canadians who are targets due to their nationality or even colour, become EASY targets due to their reluctance to acknowledge that they could ever be discriminated against. The performance evaluations create cliques. The cliques tend to include those of similar nationality, colour, or (I fucking hate this word but) race. There were mostly women, predominantly Indian, Arabic, Asian, there were like 3 white people. I saw people in my hiring group being helped by others within their cliques. I had no commonality with my coworkers so I was virtually on my own and that also made me a target, if not for subterfuge certainly for exclusion. The reality is in Canada the majority of the people who want to work in Canada and speak like Canadians WANT to be taught by a Canadian. Many of my students and the students of those for whom I subbed told me so. This also put a target on my back and added to the toxicity of the atmosphere. It made performance evaluations tougher too since the incredible (and incredibly unnecessary) complexity of the job performance, which I was told by my supervisor usually takes about 2 years to fully comprehend, requires guidance or progress will be slowed. For example, they use binders to store and record all evaluations and lesson handouts. There is a highly complex system of binder-keeping that is so highly complex that as near as I could tell, no two teachers did it in quite the same way. But in the black-and-white character of everything regulated by the Chinese dictators at the "school" it had to be done exactly right. Which meant nobody was doing it exactly right and performance was roughly zero percent binder-wise. To give you an idea of how out of the loop I was, I did not receive a single tutorial on binder maintenance until I had worked at the place for 6 months. It's something every other teacher learns almost immediately. Was I neglected because of my Canadianism? OH HELL NO! That's impossible! I could NEVER think something like that!

Mistaking management technique for wisdom. Holy crap I could write a BOOK on how this was the law at my previous job. In fact that word I just typed, "crap," was used as a management technique against me when I was pointing out mismanagement to one of the mismanagers. It was the whole thing about writing monthly reports about what I had taught, and creating success stories and (here's another big thing) all the CERTIFICATES and LICENSES I had received that boosted my educational efficacy. I just said to my supervisor, who knew I  was going to quit anyway, that it's just too much. They have the binders, the class observations, the computer records, the paperwork, and I had seen this particular supervisor SPYING on teachers all the time. There is no need for me to keep telling these snoopy shoppers again and again what I am doing in my class. And I told her so. I was right as rain and she knew it. So she used the management technique of diction. I had said, "crap" to her and because it offended her sensibilities so deeply, all the right that I had expressed was now wrong. The thing is, I don't even think I said it. But I had just come back after a brutal cold and was hopped up on cold meds so I took her word for it. I like "crap." It's a favourite of mine. It's possible that I had said it. But now I was expected to apologize for being right.

Another example: I was told my class and I had left 4 minutes early the day before. Same mismanager. I responded that I hadn't to my knowledge. She insisted I had. I then replied that I understand the time-is-money mentality of a business and that leaving early is like stealing money from the business. This is why I never do so. The fact that you will not accept my statement that I did not leave early is therefore tantamount to an accusation of not just deception, but theft. I then offered that my computer (or my classroom computer) was 3 minutes ahead of the classroom clock. That could account for the discrepancy. She blazed back with I am not accusing you just giving you a friendly reminder and again I had offended her hothouse flower sensibilities and despite the fact that once again she was wrong and I was right, I needed to apologize. Office politics. Not being honest, acquiescing to a supervisor who wrongly accuses you of crime - both pluses on the performance evaluations. Never leaving early AND being accused of stealing 4 minutes from the company even though you have a 3-hour commute for every lesson AND arrive 2 hours early and not going ballistic on the accuser - yeah not a factor on the performance evals whatsoever. 

So this "school" brings reports of successes and teacher upgrades (however factual or fantastical) to the IRCC and gets millions of taxpayer dollars because the IRCC just get blown away by this CRAP and it appears like the business is a school. Upon receiving the money, it is used to run an organization in a manner in which neither the customers, nor the taxpayers who are in a sense the shareholders of the company, would consider satisfactory if they knew the details. But this is education nowadays, right? It's savvy business, right? 

There's a kind of toast in Korea where you raise glasses of booze and say, "Mokko jukja!" This means let's drink and die. Nowadays, if Hedges is right, and I think he is, it should be let's study and die.

My problem is that the more I learn about how education should be conducted, the more I realize how badly the places I've worked have done so and have forced me to do so, and the more disenchanted with the whole thing I become. Not all, mind you, I have had a good deal of autonomy in some of my positions but that freedom has always been overshadowed by some limitation or other. I am 57 and I'm starting to realize, 

Bah! Whatever, wish me luck on my interview to go to Taiwan and do the same thing all over again!