I won't reply to specific people because all I wanted to do was kindle a bit of lively debate. Whilst one gentleman has rather ignorantly assumed that I am not qualified to teach the others have, in the main, taken it to heart. I quite agree that there is no real replacement for an education in any field. However, in countries such as Thailand where there is a need for quality teachers, it is getting its fair share of teachers qualified and unqualified who shouldn't be anywhere near a whiteboard.

There are, without any doubt, a large number of qualified teachers ( they have managed to get a degree ) who are of such low quality that they have by sheer default ended up here because no self respecting school in the UK, USA or Canada would let them near impressionable children. It is through this exact same reason you get problems in some of the other professions such as lawyers, doctors and engineers. In all these professions the moron, as someone put it, who managed to stumble and drink their way through university and scribble down enough words to obtain their degree, would end up either killing someone on the operating table ( enough cases of that around the world to fill a book ) send the wrong person to prison ( more than enough of those cases ) or designed a building that eventually collapsed ( plenty of those too ).

So whilst I agree in the main with whats been said one should not forget that many years ago a degree was not necessary for some of these positions, the humble "A" levels were quite key to moving on in some professions. Obviously before some person jumps in steam pouring from his or her ears I am not suggesting that there is a substitute for any education I am merely pointing out that there are some people on this planet that have not had the good fortune to go to university but are more than capable of contributing to an equal level of someone who has gone to university. To suggest that anyone who has a degree really is very short sighted and single minded.

You might not like the idea of it but at the end of the day if I had a choice of who was teaching my children, yes, I would like the person to have a degree and be a suitably qualified teacher but if he or she doesn't know all their grammar ( maybe they were absent from that lecture due to the dorm party the night before ) what use are they.

I only comment on this having seen first hand the inner workings of the international school and to be honest, whilst I don't want to tar everyone with the same brush, if what I saw was the normal level of English you can keep it. So I wish everyone well and I agree to rid the country of all the teachers qualified and unqualified if they don't know their p's from their q's.

Jonathan