Topic: jdredd1 's blog Can we open the parents eyes?

Great subject and comments ... I story of my own to add. I was approached many times to start an English school in a second level city in Zhejiang province and finally agreed to develop a program with a local Chinese couple who operate an after hours extracurricular activity school. Nice couple and seemed genuine enough. To cut a long story short, basically they wanted to market the "product" before the product was developed. In essence, the commercial "teaching" booklets they agreed to purchase from a local supplier (which were completely inadequate and against my recommendation) were supposedly all that was required because parents like to see their child with a book. In the end, I refused to participate further because I couldn't be apart of a business that was only interested in producing a puppet school to please parents and impress their friends with their new English school and a foreigner developing the program. Nor could I take people's hard earned money to deliver some random phrases and pretend the children were being taught English. I've seen enough teaching by self professed "native" speakers and foreigners passing themselves off as Americans when they hail from Southern Africa to understand the whole system is corrupted from both the schools and the teachers themselves, and parents being fooled out of their hard earned money. Not surprisingly, the contingent of non native English speaking white skinned people with such heavy accents that I as an Australian can't understand a significant portion of their "English language", is also significant in numbers, particularly at preschools. The owners know where these people originate from but the unsuspecting parents automatically believe their school provides what they profess. Personally, I see the issue as parents some how entrusting any business (private or not) with the word "school" in the business name. I admire their faith and I pity the children ... It's embrassing to have a Chinese parent ask their child to speak English with me and I can't understand what the child is saying. The almighty 元 ... Those shiny red Chairman Mao's make people do and say anything ... Such is life ... It wasn't any different in the so called west when we were a developing country(s)!