Thai Private Schools

For the past nine years until my recent retirement I worked as an English Teacher at a private school in Bangkok. In many ways this was a very rewarding job, in others it was very frustrating.

In the course of my blogging attempts, it is my plan to write about this job from time to time. Particularly, I will be writing about the many Native Speaking English Teachers, (36 that I can recall) which have passed through this school during my tenure as well as the numerous Filipino Teachers working there. Additionally, I will not mention the school by name as libel laws here don’t favor a farang. Just making someone lose face can be considered a crime.

However, so that you can understand the type of place in which I worked I will provide a little background on this particular school, which I believe is typical of the privately run schools in Thailand. This can be verified by any reader who question this by just reviewing the forum postings on www.ajarn.com and reading some of the threads found there.

Entrepreneurs looking for profits establish privately owned schools in Thailand. This particular school started out as a kindergarten in the owners home, he expanded it to a grade 1-6 school at a location several blocks away and then he build a third school which is also grades 1-6. I am not sure of the exact number but there are well over a 1,000 students at these three schools. They are all duly licensed and approved by the Thai Ministry of Education.

From what I understand, the Thai government lacks resourses to open all the schools it needs, so makes grants to businessmen willing to invest. The businessman then has to bare all the expenses associated with building and running the school. However, the pay back is that he charges as much tuition as he can, and cuts expenese to rock bottom.

At his point, education is no longer the primary concern, rather profit is the controlling factor. Believe me there are no poor priviate school owener. Thus, smoke and mirrors come into play. The façade is all-important. My next post will explore some of the common controls used to maintain this cash cow.