In response to Re: I NEED HELP (Michael Joseph Beauchot)

Michael,

I want to thank you for your patience in putting up with my tirade
against what I can see now, from reading other notes on this and
other websites, is a generally recognized problem among the ESL- teacher community and one that goes far beyond individual parent's and student's preference for a stereotypical teacher.

Clearly you and many other teachers are as indignant as I am at the
blatant prejeudice that allows what should be the most important consideration in the selection by an English School of a new teacher:
"How competent is the person as a teacher?" to be regarded often as a minor, if not irrelevant, issue. Perhaps you and other veterans of the system are wise to simply roll with the punches and accept the status quo. I don't know.

I want to add at this point that I am a fair-skinned, blue-eyed Caucasian, Native English-speaking male although slightly, I suspect, past the age where I could meet the maximum age specifications many of these schools would apparently impose. I have an ESL teaching position I love and wouldn't dream of leaving, in a country where no one could get away with this kind of racist, sexist advertising.

I therefore have no personal axe to grind.

My personal concern stems from the fact that, as best I can tell,
most of the people enrolling in English schools in any country
do so because they WANT TO LEARN ENGLISH. And they believe that is
the service the school of their choice is offering.

It seems many schools have neither interest in nor demonstrated abilty to significantly improve the level of English for their "customers" I hesistate to call them students. I'm no lawyer but as a layman that certainly smacks of misrepresentation/fraud to me.

Unfortunately, language abilty is, for these purposes, probably not
measureable, at least in any absolute sense, so I can't imagine any
way in which offenders could be called to account, even in countries where such practices would be considered legally or morally wrong.

The only road I can think of is Consumer Education. How difficult can it be, given the will and the means, to convince people seeking
to improve their English language ability that they are wasting their money unless they spend as much time and effort selecting
an English language school and ensuring that it supplies competent teachers as they would to hire an employee for their company or to
buy an expensive durable good?

If my hypothesis that most people who enrol in English Language training are there to learn English is wrong then I would accept
that any attempts at consumer education would be futile and perhaps people who are simply being entertained are getting exacly what they paid for.

Jack