The TEFL Workers’ Union was delighted to read Alice Rodgers’ article in the EL Gazette, Can we disentangle TEFL from its colonial past? Alice looks at the myriad of ways that TEFL is inextricably linked to global structures of empire, oppression, and exploitation.
Self-perception and reality
TEFL views itself as a largely liberalising force for good in the world. In reality, its foundations are far murkier.
The British Council (BC), the preeminent institution of the TEFL world, began life as an explicit part of the British Empire. An ostensibly cultural and educational organisation, throughout its existence the BC has acted to mask the violence inherent in the British colonial project. Even now the BC routinely refers to English language teachers as part of the “soft power” apparatus of British power abroad, a term which is offensive and disgusting in equal measure.
To this day, ELT institutions are often part of deeply unjust structures of power and domination.
BC partners with the Saudi-based “Petroleum Institute”, an organisation backed by major oil companies including BP, Shell and Total. English UK spent much of the pandemic focused on lobbying for tax cuts for language school owners and the larger “tourism” industry – including airlines.
Yet both the BC and English UK have the gall to turn around and flash their supposed green credentials, pedalling lesson plans and hosting conferences on sustainability. As TEFL workers who want the industry to live up to its purported ideals, this sort of greenwashing shouldn’t be allowed to go unchallenged
Such hypocrisy is not reserved for ELT at an institutional level.
The murder of George Floyd brought a massive global reckoning in the form of protests, reinvigorated movements for racial justice, and radical demands to reform or even abolish the police. In its wake, EF released a statement declaring that, they too, believed Black Lives Matter.
Yet, EF employs the majority of their UK teachers on week-long zero-hours contracts. Zero-hours contracts are damaging to all, but studies show that women, people of colour, and especially women of colour suffer the most mental and financial strain under zero-hours contracts.
Lofty words are one thing, but they are meaningless if a school’s employment practices embody the very institutional racism that Black Lives Matter seeks to redress.
This is even before we get into the personal wealth of EF founder Bertil Hult, whose fortune fluctuates in the 4-6 billion dollar range – while paying online teachers just a few pence above minimum wage.
The gaping chasm between the wealth of Hult family and the workers who make the company run, combined with EF’s shameless woke-washing, only serves to highlight the gulf between TEFL’s professed goals and the reality of working in the industry.
Uncomfortable questions, radical conclusions
Especially when teaching in developing countries (what might be more accurately described as the colonised world), there are often very real income differences between ourselves and our students. This is mirrored by the wages offered to so-called native speaking teachers and local staff. Schools happily charge exorbitant amounts to low-wage students, promising them English lessons are the surefire way to a better life.
Situations like this may rightly lead to us, as teachers, to ask uncomfortable questions as to the role we play in perpetuating global inequality.
From its colonial roots to its role in modern capitalism, TEFL has long been party to injustice and exploitation. Does that mean that, as teachers, we are helping to perpetuate this inequity? Are we complicit when, teaching abroad, we accept wages many times higher than what our students could ever hope to earn? Does our presence in developing countries reinforce structures of colonial, neo-colonial, and linguistic domination?
But the key question remains: as workers, are we part of the exploiters? Or are we part of the exploited?
People need to pay the bills and there’s nothing wrong with a job that provides you some degree of intellectual or emotional satisfaction. We live in a world of economic injustice. All jobs, in one way or another, reproduce an economic system that, on one hand, produces great wealth and, on the other, misery and privation.
We are the power that keeps these companies operating. Yet, we see comparatively little of the wealth we create and are denied the opportunity to democratically control our own labour.
Even if we all, as teachers, decided we wanted to drop student fees to an amount that would make English lessons accessible to low-wage workers globally, we don’t have the power to do that.
As employees, we don’t work for the common good. We work for our bosses – and their goal is to make a profit.
So where does this leave us?
The IWW, of which the TEFL Workers’ Union is a part, has always been more than a ‘bread and butter’ union. Of course, we want to see our members paid more, have more job security, and have a voice on the job. But the IWW has always had a deep commitment to social justice. We organise because we want better lives now and because we want a radically different world in the future.
TEFL, like any other profit-driven industry, can never be truly just. Exploitation – of students, of staff, of public resources – is baked into the system. We can and should fight to make TEFL less unjust. But any victories will always be a stop-gap measure until the TEFL industry can be fundamentally re-organised as a social good.
Ultimately, this means a radical transformation of the economy as we know it. It will mean abolishing the British Council, English UK, and all private language schools. It will mean creating a TEFL industry without bosses, one run democratically by staff and students.
We shouldn’t expect school owners to be our allies in achieving this. And we shouldn’t expect it to be easy. But it’s the only choice we have if we want to build a TEFL industry free of the injustice Alice so rightly outlined in her article. It’s the only way for TEFL to finally break from its colonial past.
Go check out Alice’s article, it’s great. Once you’re done, go over to her website, www.hottakeenglish.com, and follow her at @HotTakeEnglish.