My focus again shifts towards education as I start my first days of my job. That definitely has to be in italicization because I'm not really working the way most people who just got into the workforce are working. I live on a base with a bunch of other teachers and we attend different schools in a really rural area to teach English. What that entails depends on the level of the kids education, the focus of the school, and your own drive to produce results.
In my first day of school, my teaching guide, who sits in on my class, helps with translation and shows me around the school, told me that I had to go slowly because the students are not as smart as the students in private schools in the city or American students. I sort of brushed it off as their was something lost in translation-- not exposed is maybe what she meant. But when she said it the second day, it really got me thinking about the political and social determination of large groups of people who feel excluded from the full experience that some selection of the body of politic is normalized to. The excluded portion can tend to become fatalistic about their destinies. "It has always been liked this, because it must be like this". This sort of thing happens in every country, especially America. It's so hard to come up with a solution in America, since so many of the privileged refuse to acknowledge it's occurrence. But here in Thailand, I think the field may be more easily changed, though it will take genuine social service.
While it may be harder for someone to change their own luck in Thailand, it seems much more likely that small acts of service can impact greatly here. Thailand's economy owes a large portion of income to tourism, but more than their present, their future calls for them to have basic English skills. Thailand is one of the ASEAN nations that will move to using English as an official language soon. This economic and supra-political coalition of south east Asian nations will likely drastically change the pathways that Thai's take towards social progression. Here's the thing though, while other countries in this group were once colonized and therefore, under terrible and nonredeemable circumstances, have come to know English in large proportions, Thailand is the only south east Asian country never colonized. As a result English is rare here. Mostly only the upper classes and small portions of city population have a chance to learn English, and if you are somewhere really rural you will likely meet less than twenty natural English speaking persons in your life.
But what you have to understand is, that the kids here are smart. They want to learn more than any kids I've ever meet (which is cliche but none the less true). They want to be better, and they aren't thinking of a higher tax bracket (I'm not even sure that term applies in Thailand), they are thinking personal betterment. All they need is a chance. Yes it would be great if I could get some kids to read Jane Eyre and write essays (I can be Du Boisian about this), but helping them understand basic conversational skills is going to do so much to open doors for their future and in turn they can return to these villages to uplift others, and the need for western intervention will dwindle. This is the hope: A completely autonomous and self determinate society, with true freedom to determine, not merely a facade of freedom to choose between the little afforded them currently. True freedom entails the ability to choose a third option rather than the two that a hierarchical structure offers you. Progress is incremental. I want to see myself as a small part of that.
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