Nickie Muir: Keeping the golden goose alive

"They lie. They all lie! You can't trust any of them!"

It was my first day at work in a small Taiwanese English school and the vacating teacher, lumping his belongings down the steep staircase was not encouraging.

He said he was off to Mongolia, with, I noted a wheelie airport trolley suitcase. I hoped the terrain on the Mongolian steppes proved smoother than I imagined them to be and decided to not listen to a word he said.

Settling into a teaching load with bright kids and engaging colleagues, I had little to complain about. Until that is pay day came round and the pay packet was 25 per cent lighter than it should have been. The difference attributed to an ambiguous tax.

It was only then that it occurred to me that my job contract was not, in fact, a contract in the Anglo-Saxon sense, it was more the starting point of a conversation that would have to be bartered out like any other deal in the Asian market place.

I agreed to pay the tax but acknowledged that I had come a long way to work for a particular amount and would have to therefore reduce my teaching load by 25 per cent to account for the tax and look for other work to make up the difference. It was an old dance this and she was a better dancer but my pay went back to the original amount the following month - with an added bonus for performance. It was my job to put the lines in the sand and she respected them.

Watching the white-wigged academic matrons jump on to their chairs screaming "rat" while fanning themselves in disbelief over Chinese students "cheating" last week was an amusing piece of theatre and reminded me of my own naivety in thinking that just because something is "just not done" in my culture that everyone else has been given my manual of the world according to me.

Tertiary education lost much of its integrity the day Lockwood Smith signed a contract with uni students in the Quad at Vic that he'd resign if universities ever went the way of user pays.

I believe he had a nice job in politics but, from that day forward, universities lost the sacred relationship of student and teacher truth seeking, and became a client and provider engaged in a transaction. They are two vastly different things.

Because of the pressure of funding cuts, classes are bigger and there is a market model pushing tutors to get a quota through the system in order to attain a modicum of customer satisfaction - after all, students have paid for it.

There is no time to see if your pupil really has a grasp of the topic.

The English language business got destroyed partly because institutes would not back many tutors who failed students who had spent a good part of the course at the casino or for whatever other reason had not made the grade. They returned, cloaked in certificates to their home countries having spent what their parents had happily lived on for 20 years not being able to answer the phone in English in their parents' company.

Stopping cheating is relatively easy - it's not a student problem but a systems one in what has become a contractual, not academic, relationship.

The problem is that while the matrons scream "rat", they all understand that it's not a rodent but a golden goose that's waltzing through the room and nobody's about to knock that baby on the head.

nickie.muir@scrubbuzz.com