Liberal forms of exclusion in international education: A postcolonial reading

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the cultural politics of race and gender in language education has received a great deal of attention. However, this is less so in Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand. This is not so much because these issues are absent from education in Southeast Asia, but more because, in countries such as Thailand, there is a great deal of unwillingness to examine questions related to race, even though aspects of international education in Thailand is profoundly raced and racist. This is evident indirectly in the curriculum and pedagogy, and more directly in employment recruitment and staffing of language centers, be they international schools, private language schools, language departments within private schools, or government and semi-government agencies such as the British Council, and Thai government universities. In fact, the racist privileging and exclusion has a mundane sameness throughout the industry, with Whites, especially those of Anglo-American background, capitalizing on the easy association Thais make between skin color and English language proficiency. The paper is divided into two parts. First, drawing from a wide range of in-school publication and press articles, it documents and analyzes, in a close-up way, the techniques and strategies of the cultural politics of privilege and liberal forms of exclusion within the field of teaching English as a foreign language in international schools in Thailand (EFL). More specifically, it looks at some of the ways in which English negatively affects the lives of Asian children in and out of the classroom, and the way this is often justified by school administrators, parents and the wider Thai community. The second section of the paper examines the way in which the concept of the “native speaker” works to privilege, marginalize, include and exclude teachers of various backgrounds. It begins by situating the native speaker issue theoretically before examining how it works empirically in racial discrimination in teacher recruitment.