Agreed that there is a story of supply and demand, but to me the situation was basically white merchants coming on African shores ready to trade. A few righteous merchants ready to establish solid and meaningful commercial relationships, and plenty of sleazy people who’d heard you can make a quick buck exchanging shiny beads and bent forks against gold nuggets. That’s no “Golden Age” to me.
To your credit @TT I don’t contend there are skilled and good-willed teachers; but the gullible demand sent the whole market tumbling.
For the locals who did well from the market back then, and continue to exploit whichever foreigners they can pay the least, the Golden Age has also passed. Like any market, there will be negative aspects.
But a golden age when opportunities are plentiful means opportunities for everyone. And a bear market is bare. For the unqualified, the qualified, those who aren’t really as qualified as they think they are; for the entrepreneurs and support staff; not just locally but globally (except, possibly, the US)
Perhaps in the long term the parents and students will benefit more (especially as AI develops, though I still lean towards the value of real social communication), but generally I don’t think it is fair to say that ESL teachers have been taking advantage of the ignorant locals
Anyways. I see your point, that golden age doesn’t fit your perspective of what I am talking about. That’s fine, it still works well for me
I disagree, native speaker is not a good enough teaching qualification. Teaching is a profession, and teachers should be licensed professionals. The entry barrier is very low here and as a result the quality is also low.
I guess that to get a position teaching Chinese in your home country one would need more than a PRC or ROC passport, Taiwan should have the same principle.
You mention being a native speaker no longer being a "job passport ", my stand is that it shouldnt have been to begin with.
Anyway, with a PhD you are obviously in a different league, universities and international schools still pay well and people with your qualifications can still benefit from working in Asia. The buxiban industry will suffer.
Have done that, I like what I’m doing now (mostly)
Going back to the topic, I took a different track for this last degree because I was bored of being just an English teacher. Lucky for me my field now is not strictly language education, since it seems the easy days of high paying English language education jobs (commensurate with qualifications) are most likely over everywhere
Nobody seems to have disagreed on that, the fundamental point of this thread
I want to add a point that has not yet been mentioned: the rise of Xi Jinping and his decision to shut down private English language schools in the PRC. That’s a huge market (albeit one that I would not be interested in for various reasons).
As long as Xi’s regime continues in this direction, a massive part of the East Asian market will be gone, with a correspondingly large number of EFL teachers thrown out of work, which should—at least in theory—push regional wages downward.
Unless, of course, we fancy ourselves as a would-be Singapore, requiring a huge public investment in EMI initiatives . . . in which case, there still may be (at least for now) opportunities in Taiwan for those with recognized credentials.
Yeah, this was in the corner of my mind. China has passed peak ESL not because of the economy but the politics. I know a handful of people still there, and others who chose to leave, but yeah. China under Xi is no longer a big market, and I can’t see Vietnam as being the next major destination
Demographics too. Their population ageing is projected to be more extreme than Japan’s or South Korea’s! And their immigration policy is nonexistent, immeasurably worse than even ours. So less youth around to teach that pesky foreign language (while in the meantime Xi sends his kid to Harvard—mind-bending hypocrisy).
I think Taiwan has passed peak along with the rest of Asia and the ME and Eastern Europe. Other threads have gone into detail about why an international and bilingual vision for Taiwan probably has too many barriers to overcome
The investment is there in the government schools, for talent. But a whole of government approach to retain international workers broadly and to convince society here that this is desireable is unlikely to manifest with enough momentum to matter
But yeah, for a few with the right paper there are still opportunities. It just isn’t what it was, from Korea to Kuwait
I was focusing only on the funding and the general policy direction under Tsai. I don’t disagree with you at all about the adequacy of the likely outcome(s).
Yes. After that and the Eurozone crisis, the country started getting flooded with too many expats from overseas who couldn’t get steady work in their own countries… which of course had a knock-on effect on us already there. Things started getting more difficult there around 2010, 2011 iirc. Many friends left around that time.
I think I heard stories like that. I started teaching ESL just when that whole fiasco was happening. So in Korea, I met a couple NOVA refugees (including the one who told me the story of the chained gate that I recounted earlier… imagine going to work one morning and without warning or even a text message, your workplace is shuttered and your employers aren’t reachable).
