Corruption Curriculum

I haven't said much about Cambodia’s education system – my raison d'être for being here – because it’s so troublingly difficult to encapsulate. This recent Phnom Penh Post headline is a good start: “Corruption curriculum headed to junior high.” Since the article, the new corruption curriculum (with modules like “Is money really everything?”) has made its way from high school down to primary school. Why would fourth graders need to study corruption? Because it’s endemic to the society at every level, including schools.

I knew that bribery and theft are common here – Cambodia ranks 150^th out of 160+ countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. But I was so saddened to learn that children as young as first grade have to pay off their teachers for the privilege of attending school – a nickel or a dime or a quarter each day – or risk being punished, given poor grades, or expelled. Aside from being a degraded practice and depriving poor families of money they cannot spare, this teaches kids from their earliest experiences with schooling that you have to “pay to play.” And it doesn’t stop there. Children routinely buy answers to tests and bribe teachers for good grades and to falsify attendance records so that they can graduate. As part of the anti-corruption measures, the government put a tighter lid on answers to last year’s standardized tests. Scores plummeted and the nation panicked. But it’s a good reality check, I think, and hopefully will lead to more reforms.

In the meantime, Cambodia is turning out students who are woefully unprepared. Those who make it through high school and college have had a deficient academic experience due to the cheating regimen and poor teacher preparation. But of course most don’t even make it that far. Primary school enrollment is strong (over 90%), but many students don’t finish and enrollment in middle and high school drops off sharply. The stats are inconsistent, but it seems that significantly less than half of the population makes it through high school (maybe even less than a quarter).

As an educator, all this makes me want to scream at the teachers. But it’s hard to blame them. They earn on average around $100+ per month (maybe more in the urban centers) and deal with class sizes anywhere from 40 to 80 depending on the region (it’s hard to recruit teachers in the rural areas, where 80 percent of the population live, and class sizes are higher there). So they extract bribes and take on extra jobs just to scrape by. Half of the teachers only have a high school education (a quarter have less than that) and they lack the training and resources to meet the standards we demand in the developed world. It’s estimated that as a result of the Cambodian genocide, between 75 and 80 percent of educators either were killed, died of overwork, or left the country. So the nation has literally been rebuilding its pool of teachers and academics over the past generation from scratch.

I could go on, but the picture is clear and bleak. I wish that I had an opportunity to spend time in schools with children and teachers because I’m sure that this would help me to get past the statistics, humanize the challenges a little more, and see hope in the struggles of the many good people who I’m sure are trying to do the right thing. But alas, official approval from the government bureaucracy for a school visit or interview with teachers is not forthcoming, at least for now, so my ruminations are limited to what I read and hear from others. At least in my meetings with school officials, there is talk about human rights and democracy, child-centered approaches and more teacher training. I hope I’m invited back in a decade and can remark on vast changes in the system. The children deserve it and the nation's future depends on it.