A lurchy struggling entry

One nice thing about students is that they are generally self-selecting as long as the class is not mandatory and the expectations high enough. As a result I've managed to shed about a quarter of the class at Osh Bazaar. While the benefits for the socially marginalized out state diaspora children may be negligible, the effect on my job satisfaction is good. I may have even managed to scare off a whole class by asking for lump-sum payment for a month. My middle-class students did not show up today, perhaps due to the depressing weather but more likely intimidated by the commitment. That is okay, I only want commited students. This is hypocritical because I will only be here for two more months but, that's life.

I read/edited a disturbing piece by my grad-school friend here that qualitatively documents a serious problem in Kyrgyzstan today: corruption of education. Kids as young as grade school buy their grades. Many parents even encourage it, diluted that their only child/oldest child is God's gift to grade-school and therefore and fault must lie with the teacher (if you have to bribe them so be it, so long as sonny gets a '5'). Her work focused on the Medical Academy here. A survey revealed (performed by a professional organization) revealed that 59% of students have paid for grades. MED STUDENTS. My lexicon is not advanced enough to express my disbelief without four letter words and exclamation points.

There is a whole range of methods to do it ranging from phone calls from powerful relatives to utilizing students with buddy-buddy relationships with professors to flat up ballsy go into the office with some cash and buy a grade.

There are lots of layers to the problem, most of them reinforcing and typical of underdeveloped countries (according to the little academia I have familiarized myself with). First the teachers are over-worked with class hours loads several times that of their US/European counter-parts. The result is that teaching becomes rote, undynamic, uninspiring, and uninteresting. It would follow that anyone in a job with the precedant adjectives would take little pride in their work. And people are underpaid. So if Richie Rich wants to buy a 5 and I can afford a non-Soviet TV, why not?

The students may be overworked too... they have to take stupid classes in Med School like Bibliography, sociology and foreign language. Making people with very specific professional goals study very tangential subjects is a recipe for justification of cheating and grade-buying.

I think the main problem, however, lies in the students. The ability to pay for grades generally benefits the students most of all. They are able to finesse the $/free-time ratio and still get the comfortable life-style persumably earned by rigorous study and excellent talent associated with doctors. But they complain how the professors are corrupt while they pay the bribes. In otherwords their is no ownership of responsibility for the problem. This is a general problem here (and everywhere). People complain about the corruption but when it comes down to waiting in line for a week or paying the bribe, most people pay the bribe.

After an hour of no progress in a line that seemed to have neither beginning or end, I would probably pay the $5 too. There are degrees of evil when it comes to corruption and I think that buying anatomy grades as a med-student is somewhere between cutting in line at the DMV and assisting a heroine trafficker.

I guess the point is that watching great chunks of decent people let engage in tacit support for corruption has refueled that self-righteous fire of self-accountability. So next time I get irritated about global waming (see NYT article 1 and NYT article 2, if the NYT is too leftist for you I've gone some old fashioned British libertarians at the Economist too), I get angry about world povery or US foreign poilicy, I am going to do a little something to change my own consumption patterns.

Then by all means, write I plan to write my congressmen.