Volunteering in Schools Across The East

It has long been possible for those who have graduated from high school or college in the West to nip over to Asia – principally Southeast Asia – and volunteer in a school for a month. In recent years, ‘Voluntourism’ has been heavily criticized from various international bodies, claiming that the quick turn over of volunteers and the transformation of poverty into a quasi-tourist attraction, does far more harm than good, despite the best intentions of the volunteers in question.

However, now there are more and more opportunities for qualified teachers to find postings in countries that they may have visited when backpacking around the globe. The rise of international schools in Asia has soared over the last few years. Institutions that were once primarily the preserve of children of expats and kids of army personnel are now full with the offspring of the local population, who are clamoring for their children to be enrolled in the British, European, or American education systems. No county in Southeast Asia had more than 12 international schools a decade ago, whereas today there are 172 in Thailand, 142 in Malaysia, and 63 in Singapore. Further east, there are currently 233 in Japan, and 171 in Hong Kong alone.

The primary reason for locals wishing to send their children to these schools is not because they think it is necessarily a better educational system, but because they want to make it easier for their children to apply to Western universities. According to The Times’ World University Rankings 2014-2015, there are only 11 Asian universities in the global top 100.

Technology Playing its Part

Education in the developing world is taking off in varying guises. In places such as Kenya, we are beginning to see the bizarre scenario where school children are being provided with their own laptops to use at school, while they still have no tables or chairs, and most importantly, no electricity to charge those laptops.

Nonetheless, in both Asia and Africa, the spread of smartphones and through projects such as Facebook’s Internet.org, internet connection (still far behind the West, but still a striking rise when one compares it with the situation in these parts of the world only a few years ago) is allowing children and teenagers to connect to the outside world and unconventional educational sources when home from school. Not only does this help with their English, but also allows them to build up an affinity with the internet and technology in general; knowledge of which is becoming increasingly a prerequisite for any job application throughout the world. The ease in which young people can buy a domain name with web hosts like that of 1&1, is seeing an explosion in personal blogs which, if nothing else, gives that person a basic understanding of web construction and Search Engine Optimization.

International school or not, the spread of the net will hopefully allow the youth of the developing world to catch up with their Western peers when it comes to beginning their careers and ‘being connected.’

Bert Maxwell is the Global Technology Editor for Wandering Educators