Cambodia's Curse (33 page)

Into the early twentieth century, the nation had not a single middle school, high school, or college. The French built the first high schools and middle schools in the 1930s, all of them in Phnom Penh. But the French occupiers weren’t interested in educating children for the betterment of Cambodian society. No, these children were trained specifically to become administrators in the French colonial government. As government employees, they received better than decent pay, by Cambodian standards. Better still, the young bureaucrats immediately found themselves sitting astride the flow of graft money. Could there be a better job?

In the 1960s King Sihanouk began building more and more schools, even though almost no one in the nation was educated or equipped to teach. The building of schools did have the ancillary effect of involving the government in village life for the first time in Cambodian history. However, the paucity of educated teachers was a problem that would linger for decades.

In 2008 Suomi Sakai, head of the UNICEF office, explained why, on average, it took ten years for a child to finish elementary school.
“One reason is teacher training; some of the teachers in rural areas have no better than a third grade education.” In the mid-1950s fewer than 1 child in 60 managed to complete elementary school. Just 1 child in 3,000 made it to high school.

Even with his new schools in chaos, Sihanouk decided to build a university system. A technical college opened in 1964 whose primary mission was to teach agronomy and other skills related to agriculture. But the students showed no interest. More than 90 percent of the technical university’s 1,300 students majored in the liberal arts, the course work they needed to get a lucrative government job. They wanted to be modern-day mandarins. Just 117 studied agronomy. Sihanouk was appalled. “Students must adapt themselves to various professions,” he declared. “Unfortunately everyone wants to be a red tape artist.” He repeatedly warned that his government simply did not have enough jobs for everyone. The students ignored him, and most graduates remained unemployed.

But then the French had structured the primary and secondary education system to train Cambodians for government service. Sihanouk advocated reform, but it never came. Almost fifty years later, in 2009, Women’s Affairs Minister Ing Kantha Phavi noted, “It’s still the dream of every Cambodian to work in government. They can make a lot of money,” she added with a smile, while offering the slippery-finger gesticulation for corruption. “Very few get hired now, but it is still the dream. These other areas,” engineering, agriculture, technology, “they are not attractive subjects.” What’s more, “a lot of parents don’t like to see their children working in these other areas.”

Students remained so focused on becoming mandarins that the state had little choice but to build the National University of Management. It opened in its current form in 2004 and immediately became the most popular college in Cambodia’s university system. “We have 15,000 students, and ours is by far the most popular major,” said Vice Rector Seng Bunthoeun. “We teach them law, economics, history, English, general culture. But students don’t like courses not related to management”—usually, he added, “because their parents push them
to do that. They want to join the government, but each year the ministries take only about 30 students.” So only about 10 percent of his graduates actually found jobs. “I try to help them,” but he faced the same problem university rectors confronted during Sihanouk’s time.

S
un Thun taught social studies to middle school students in Kampong Thom Province, north of Phnom Penh. He offered lessons in democracy, human rights ... and corruption. That’s what got him into trouble. “My teaching on corruption is short,” he said, thrusting forward a tattered paperback textbook. “It’s all in here.” He tapped the book urgently with his index finger. “But I explain it with real examples of corruption from the community. For example, during exams students have to pay money to teachers to pass. They have to pay money so they can cheat on the exams.”

The principal somehow heard about this bit of course work and reported Sun Thun to the district office. An official charged him with “unprofessional behavior” and ordered him transferred to a school in the province’s hinterlands. Sun Thun refused, and the teachers’ association organized large demonstrations in Kampong Thom and Phnom Penh, outside the Education Ministry. Sun Thun was also the Cambodia Independent Teachers’ Association local representative. He appealed, and the transfer was stayed while the appeal was considered.

Sitting in the yard outside the Kampong Thom office of the teachers’ union, Sun Thun was dressed as a professional in a striped white shirt with a button-down collar, shirt tail out, and black pants. Agitated, angry, arms waving, his expression squint-eyed wary, he leaned far forward, almost as if he believed he needed to be in physical contact for his words to hold meaning. How did the school learn what he was teaching in his classroom? “The principal sneaked over to listen to me,” he said, shaking his forefinger. “He knows I am president of the CITA,” the teachers’ union. “I started a debate on the budget and the
payroll of the school,” highlighting the inevitable kickbacks and corruption. “So the principal is not happy with me. A teacher, to be principal of the school, must make payoffs to his superiors. The teachers have to pay him or buy food or beer. I didn’t pay him. That’s why he turned me in, that plus my questions about the school budget.”

Principal Te Kim Sien denied it all. “Sun Thun did wrong and abused his professional position,” he said in his dark office that doubled as the school storeroom (like most, this school had no electricity). He wore a pink T-shirt and a grave expression. “I will not allow him to stir up trouble here anymore.” He went on: “We don’t sell exam results here. In Baray District, I have never heard of paying for exams.” Keng Vantaa, a young teacher sitting beside him, chimed in without being asked and offered a confirmatory rebuttal. “We don’t have to pay to get jobs. Teachers here are not interested in promotion. We like teaching. So there’s no need to pay anyone.” While insisting that not a hint of corruption tainted the school, the principal and his friend showed little hesitation describing the school system’s underbelly. As illustration, they pointed to a new one-story classroom building.

Cambodia had held elections again in the summer of 2008, and this time Hun Sen, using all the aboveboard and underhanded tactics employed in previous elections, won a decisive majority. He needed no coalition partners. (He’d recently managed to change the law so the winner needed only 50 percent of the vote, not two-thirds.) Ranariddh had retired from government and taken a position in the royal palace.
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And Sam Rainsy became a strident opposition leader with no role except to complain.

During the campaign Hun Sen promised Te Kim Sien’s school a new building with twelve classrooms and a reception hall. On election day the building was partly built, and the lumber for the rest lay stacked beside it. It happened, though, that the majority of voters in the Baray District where Sun Thun taught had voted for the Sam Rainsy Party. The day after the election, workers showed up and hauled all the lumber away. “All construction materials were removed during the night and later sold at auction,” Sun Thun said at the time. “I think the CPP spent a lot of money here, and when they didn’t get the votes, they became spiteful.” The episode received negative attention in the news media, and the workers eventually returned—with new marching orders. “After hauling away all of the lumber for the school after the election,” said Keng Vantaa, “they built a new building, but the metal was so cheap they could not build two stories, as needed. So we got this.” He pointed to the small one-story building with two or three classrooms. That did little to address the school’s shortage of class space.

The school also had too few teachers, and like the majority of schools nationwide, most of them worked only part-time. They left early, cutting their classes short, or skipping them altogether, so they could work second jobs. The workday for middle and upper schools was supposed to be from 7:00 to 11:00 a.m. and then from 2:00 to 4:40 p.m., but “five teachers leave early every day because they have a job with an NGO,” Sun Thun said. They didn’t show up for their afternoon classes. The principal downplayed the problem. “Most of the teachers, their wives work,” he averred. “But some have a grocery store, say, and leave early to work there.”

This problem sprang up as a result of a directive from Phnom Penh intended to discourage teachers from demanding bribes from their students. “We are going to allow them to work after school—tutoring, for example,” Im Sethy said in 2008, when he was deputy education minister. “We are encouraging teachers to solve their own problems.” So teachers began taking after-school jobs that soon evolved into
during-school jobs, including paid tutoring—while still taking bribes from their students.

Te Kim Sien may have been innocent of everything Sun Thun alleged, but across the country school principals were often considered part of the problem—as corrupt and self-interested as anyone in government. Many had paid their supervisors for their appointment, and so they felt entitled to recompense.

In another part of Kampong Thom Province, teachers at Phat Sanday secondary school charged their principal with billing the school district for ghost teachers, a hallowed Cambodian tradition. When the principal heard of the complaint, he held back (and probably kept for himself) two months of overtime pay belonging to the seven teachers who complained.

In Prey Veng Province, in the Southeast, the teachers’ association pointed out that the principal of Neak Leung secondary school had built a fence around his house next to the school, extending it onto school property, grabbing more than 125 square yards. The principal professed to be trying to protect the land from “land-grabbing villagers,” and Hoem Sophal, the provincial school director, offered a flippant explanation. He claimed that the teachers “were involved” in the principal’s land grab, too. He didn’t explain how. But then Hoem Sophal had little regard for teachers anyway. A few months earlier they had accused him of skimming from their salaries. His explanation then: He was volunteering as a monk and could not respond to the allegations “until I leave the monkhood.” With all of that, for most teachers education remained a joyless profession.

Kdep Sokhin, a handsome young man, was one of those rare students who stayed in school through the twelfth grade. Then he attended a teachers college for two years. After that he started work at a small elementary school in western Kampong Thom Province, earning forty-eight dollars a month. One summer afternoon nineteen children, seven girls and twelve boys, all of them eleven or twelve years old, sat in his classroom at desks that had been drawn on, carved, and
otherwise defaced by generations of children. They wore simple uniforms, black pants and plain white shirts. The girls’ shirtsleeves offered a small white decorative bow, a rare feint toward formality.

Only the windows lit the room; this school, too, had no electricity. Two canisters holding clean water sat on a table by the door. Teninch-high lettering on the side told everyone that UNICEF had provided this. In 2003 UNICEF also built the bathrooms out back, a large sign said. Now the toilets were cracked, broken, and home to spiders and their webs. A ditch latrine beside it was the new bathroom. Elsewhere on the small school yard, a bare concrete pavilion served as the lunchroom. Two fire pits, each with three rocks, held up rusty grates.

Inside, Kdep Sokhin lectured about long division while writing examples on the chalkboard, smiling at the children as he spoke. He, too, wore a white shirt and jet-black pants, though stripes of yellow dust filled the creases behind his knees. He was twenty-six and had been teaching there for four years. “Teaching’s not really fun,” he said when class was over, that smile still affixed to his face. “The children are easy, but it’s hard to survive on this salary and have money to buy petrol for my motorbike. There are only two teachers here and 143 students in grades 1 to 5.”

On that day, however, his classroom was less than half full. “So many are absent. Some of the children went off with their fathers to work in paddies in Thailand.” A teachers’ union survey that year found that 54 percent of the nation’s teachers said they do not teach regularly and “took no notice of students.” The teachers blamed the government for this attitude, saying they weren’t paid enough. But for Kdep Sokhin, the bigger problem was the other teacher at his school. “He wants to transfer to another school, near his family. I would be alone if he left. I have no idea where another teacher would come from.” Most likely Kdep Sokhin would have 143 students all to himself.

In 2009 the World Bank published a special multivolume report on education and competitiveness. It echoed concerns that had been
reverberating among donors and the nation’s leaders for decades. Cambodia cannot grow until it “reforms its education system,” the report said. As long as the workforce remained unskilled and barely educated, Cambodia will remain “the biggest laggard” in Asia. The year before, the International Republican Institute had surveyed the Cambodian public. Seventeen percent of the respondents said they had no education, while another 49 percent said they had attended only one or two years of primary school. So, in 2008, two-thirds of the public was barely literate. Pollsters spoke to 2,000 people face-to-face nationwide and said the survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percent. The World Bank said that had to change if the Cambodians expected to become prosperous enough even to catch up with their neighbors. Other figures in the survey seemed to verify that. Almost 80 percent of the respondents said they earned less than one hundred dollars a month. Half of Cambodia’s people earned less than fifty dollars a month. That’s six hundred dollars a year.