Hard to disagree with anything he said especially when the average salary hasn't gone up.
From the 2004 article:"So while teaching English is fine if you want to spend a year abroad, and great for meeting pretty foreign girls, considered as a career that might offer some degree of professional fulfilment, it fails on every count. No one with a scrap of ambition can possibly consider it. As the philosopher Alain de Botton says: 'You become a TEFL teacher when your life has gone wrong.'"The most objectionable aspect of this industry is not, however, the misery of those who work in it, but the posturing endemic to it. Typical of this is the pretence of professional credibility that surrounds the Mickey Mouse teaching certificate most teachers possess...."Some TEFL slaves have been so thoroughly defeated that they don't even realise what has happened to them. I can sniff out the 'lifers' a mile off . . . scruffy figures, utterly out of synch with the modern world, any style or sex-appeal they once possessed squeezed out of them by years of drudgery, exploitation and poverty...."After the age of 40, English teachers are burnt-out, skill-less and unemployable, their working lives a wasteland, their future oblivion. Suicide attempts are not unheard of. A former colleague of mine, a charming and talented but fatally lazy Scotsman who was well on his way to drinking himself to death, was recently found in a pool of blood, having tried to finish himself off by slashing his wrists."Teaching ESL is best for young people who want a gap year experience or older people retired from a successful first career. Spending your prime working years teaching ESL is not a good idea.
Thank you T_Rex. I wasn't about to give my email away just so I could read the article.I don't know. A couple of things ring true, but I'm not going to bite. The OP should have better things to do. All I'll say is; This industry has given me a lot of satisfaction over the years, and has provided myself and my family with a bit of financial security. Go figure!
Pay for entry level hagwan and PS school jobs? No, it hasn't. They have relied on growing interest in Korean popular culture to keep a steady flow of fresh out of college applicants.
Adjusted for inflation pay has gone down at all levels, including at universities.
I've been to Seoul three times since 2000. Once for clothes, once to the consulate, and once for a 60th party at a restaurant. And yes, even the simplest have to eventually figure out that K.dramas do not reflect actual life in Korea...but...who would know!