my chinese classes and a change of heart

My Chinese school, called the Taipei Language Institute or TLI, is a private language company not affiliated with any university in Taiwan. Originally there were four students in my class, including two French students and a South Korean woman, but attendance has withered; this past week I was the only one who came to class until a new Japanese student enrolled. Although my classes are generally well-taught, this trend, and other observations, have shaken my faith in commercial education programs, or education "businesses".

Until recently my instinct had always been to support private language businesses because more immediate exposure to the market makes teachers and administrators far more accountable to their students -- who are, after all, paying customers. Certainly the benefits of these pressures can be felt at TLI, where teachers are extremely responsive and flexible to the requests of their students. For example, when teachers were late to class several days in a row, students complained to the CEO, and the next day teachers who were late by a certain time saw their salaries slightly penalized and they were not allowed to teach the class. In contrast, my friends studying Chinese at universities sometimes complain that their curriculum is traditional and rigid, and that teachers and administrators are strict and unresponsive to suggestions or requests from their unseasoned students.

I've come to realize, however, that this very unresponsiviness at the universities has important advantages. There are clear benefits to the flexibility offered by TLI, but as more than one classmate has remarked to me, they are a business, and in the final analysis they "really just care about your money." This does not mean that their teachers aren't good --they are -- but it does mean that students are rarely chastised when homework goes undone, and they aren't scolded for not paying attention during a lecture, and no one protests when the entire class (except for Hank) skips for a week. After all, we're not just students, we're customers -- and perhaps if we were hassled over these relapses we might just look elsewhere for friendlier, more accommodating service.

I'm beginning to think that the very "flexibility" TLI shows it's students is a fundemental problem with language program businesses -- the relationship between teacher and student is inverted when students who should respect the training of their professors are transformed into almighty customers. Mr. Brown, one of my favorite English teachers in high school, once reminded our class that learning is about being uncomfortable. When teachers are demoted to service-providers, it is hard to fight a natural impulse to keep their customers as comfortable as possible.

In contrast to my French and South Korean classmates who skipped a week without reproof, Bryan, who studied at a university, remarked that skipping one day of class earned him critical and unsympathetic comments from his teachers, who pushed him to make up the work and warned him that he'd missed important topics. Somehow the maxim "the customer is always right" is fundamentally inappropriate in an educational setting.