THE EVOLUTION OF CAMBODIAN PRIVATE EDUCATION

Enhancing Pedagogy In Cambodia (EPIC)

I just participated in an education conference in Siem Reap, Cambodia. I was pleasantly surprised by a genuine desire to improve Cambodian education, by government officials, NGOs, and foreign agencies. Notably absent was any input from private schools, as though they were not interested in enhancing education. Why?

When I came to Cambodia 30 years ago, the country was a basket case, coming out of the Khmer Rouge era, when some 95% of all teachers had been killed. Education was especially weak, with teachers earning only a dollar a day, the exam system thoroughly corrupt, etc.

Private schools and colleges grew up as an alternative to the nearly nonexistent public sector. This was an attempt to bring some form of education to this failed state.

However, public education gradually but greatly improved over the next 30 years, to the point where it became at least an affordable alternative to the private schools. The private schools more and more were seen as only marginally better than the public schools.

Today, as I learned from the Conference, public education is forging ahead with reforms, while the private schools are mired in the status quo. Worse, the private schools have turned to marketing, in an effort to project an image of success and wealth, at the expense of quality education. The goal is now to attract rich families as a status symbol. Fancy new buildings and showy equipment increasingly replace raising salaries for qualified teachers.

Private universities, intent on increasing profits, have switched to Khmer instruction in order to increase student enrollment. While they call themselves ‘International’ universities, they have in fact cut off all their international contacts because their students cannot understand English. Public institutions, on the other hand, can offer courses in English, thereby attracting foreign professors, exchanges, and projects.

Another reason that public institutions, especially universities, have surpassed private ones is that only public universities are eligible for generous grants from foreign governments, World Bank, and the like.

One private university’s original “Mission Statement” included a phrase to the effect that it would help disadvantaged students. After a few years, the university’s owner quietly dropped that phrase.

What’s sad is that there are dedicated teachers in the private schools, who want only the best for their students, but they run up against a brick wall in the administrators and owners, who are willing to sacrifice students’ education in order to polish the school’s wealthy image.

To return to the question of why private schools are not interested in improving public education, the answer is now clear:  they are in competition. Any improvement in public education diminishes whatever advantage the private schools may have over them. More students may opt for the improved public schools, and that will diminish the profits of the private schools. The private, for-profit schools don’t want that.

TOXIC MASCULINITY IS GENDER DYSPHORIA

What? I’ll bet you never heard anyone make that claim before. But hear me out, as I make my case.

My understanding of Gender Dysphoria

The basic dilemma is that some people’s physical sex is male, while their mental make-up (gender) is female. Most transgenders will state that they have always been that way; there was no conscious choice to become transgender. They feel hard-wired as females. You often hear them state that they are a female trapped in a male body. They have always felt the disconnect between their gender identity and the expectations society placed on them to act ‘male’, meaning hard, assertive, tough, aggressive, competitive, etc. They felt that, in trying to act ‘male’, they were not behaving as their true self, i.e. feminine. If you read accounts of transgenders who ‘came out’, they are almost always very positive and happy, with no regrets, since they have resolved the conflict between their sex and their gender.

Toxic Masculinity

Jan. 6 rioters

The uber-male, in my observation and analysis, also feels the disconnect between his male sex – especially society’s expectations of male behavior – and his feminine side. Unlike the transgender, he tries to hide those feminine traits and to pretend to adhere to society’s expectations – in spades! He adopts an image of being super-tough, super-aggressive. It’s a Wizard of Oz situation: behind the pompous wizard is a little old man.

The Wizard of Oz – all smoke and mirrors.

Dressing up in tough-guy military garb is the gender-dysphoric equivalent of transvestitism. The tough guy dresses up to convince himself and others that he is a real man, while the transvestite dresses up to reconcile their physical and mental identities.

I always felt that the Jan. 6 rioters were especially pathetic. All dressed up in their cosplay military gear, trying to show how tough they were. I have read accounts of prostitutes who describe these guys as some of the mousiest, wimpiest pipsqueaks they have met. All because the macho guys feel that at their core is a feminine psyche that is somehow not man enough.

My claim is that both the transgender and the toxic male experience the same mismatch between their sexual bodies and their innate personalities. The transgender ends by adapting their physical body – through Hormone Replacement or surgery – to their mental identity. The uber-male tries to transform their mental make-up to their physical sex, or at least, to make their behavior conform to the expectations of society.

Why do uber-males hate transgenders to the point of wanting to kill them? I think it’s because they realize that transgenders can see through their macho mask to their more feminine self. Transgenders remind them of their own gender dysphoria. I think this fear of being found out also applies to spouse abuse, as the wife eventually sees through the tough-guy mask to the weak little boy inside. The most devastating remark a woman can say to a man is “You’re not a real man.”

You can guess that I tend to sympathize with the transgenders. They are aiming at integrity – living their true self by reconciling their physical and mental components. The uber-mensch, on the other hand, is hiding his true self from himself and from the world. When I see his constantly angry face, I think he is essentially unhappy.

IT’S NOT RACISM; IT’S RACE HATRED

‘Alligator Auschwitz’, the concentration camp built in the Everglades, really brings out the race hatred in Trump and the MAGA world. Did you see the smiles of jubilation when they described alligators eating 65 million immigrants? While liberals are aghast at the cruelty of the concentration camp, MAGA folks are rubbing their hands in glee. With MAGA, cruelty is the point. MAGA would love to see a photo of an alligator eating an immigrant. The Trumpies were actually selling souvenir merchandise for the concentration camp.

Cruelty is precisely the point

To state that those immigrants are sub-standard is racism. But rejoicing in their suffering is outright and overt hatred.

The hatred developed when leaders like Trump convinced the out-of-work laborer that immigrants had taken his job. Or the student who wasn’t admitted to a college, where he was told that less-qualified minorities were admitted ahead of him. Trump was able to instill a sense of grievance in those white supremacists, which became not just a belief in white supremacy, but an intense hatred of those non-whites whom Trump was able to label as rapists, murderers, and eaters of your pets.

Another example is that guy Garcia, who was sent to the El Salvador gulag but was recently brought back. Liberals are infuriated by the photos of those prisoners being marched through the prison, and they are further horrified to hear Garcia’s descriptions of the torture and deprivations in the concentration camp. But Republicans are overjoyed to see this guy – painted falsely by Trump as an M-13 terrorist – suffer to the max. Schadenfreude to the max.

I fear that the recent Big Beautiful Bill could make matters worse. Millions of white people will lose their Medicaid or Medicare, and will certainly not blame Trump. Trump will trot out examples of non-white people getting free health care, and that will exacerbate the feelings of grievance of his base.

So where does one cross the line between racism and race hatred? After all, slaveowners didn’t hate their slaves. I guess the answer must be that grievance is that red line. Not just fear, but a feeling that the minority race is making your life harder. Signs that the ‘Great Replacement’ is actually happening. That’s why Trump’s war on DEI is so effective. Remember that Trump even tried to blame that deadly airplane crash on DEI, even though there were no minorities involved. His argument was that DEI policies caused stress to the white pilots so that they could not do their jobs properly.

Too many white people feel that minorities and immigrants have taken their jobs or gained unfair admission to universities. “Affirmative action” may be the most harmful policy against race relations in American history. The backlash of hatred is turning out to be deadly.

COULD TRUMP PERMIT SLAVERY?

The Courts could not stop him.

Suppose Trump suddenly issued a royal decree declaring slavery legal. That’s clearly unconstitutional. How could anyone stop this?

The obvious answer should be that the courts should step in and say, “That’s unconstitutional. You can’t do that.” However, the recent SCOTUS decision states that courts cannot do this.

So suppose next that several states introduce slavery with millions of slaves. Once again, you’d think that the courts could stop that with an injunction. However, you’d be wrong again.

No, each slave would have to file suit against the government for damages incurred. Each of those millions of individual cases could be appealed up to the Supreme Court, who would have to decide on millions of individual cases. The pro-slavery lobby would no doubt come up with dozens of nit-picking reasons to throw out all the cases, or they could at least delay the decisions by years in related litigation.

There are hundreds of similar cases where Trump can issue any royal decree he wants, however illegal or unconstitutional, and it would be nearly impossible for the courts to stop him, now that they are banned from issuing injunctions.

Consider especially the warrantless kidnapping of innocent brown-skinned Americans, followed by shipping them off to torture chambers around the world, where they remain for the rest of their lives. The American courts, according to the new SCOTUS ruling, cannot stop this. Even worse, once these individuals have been ‘disappeared’ into foreign hellholes, the US government has no way to bring them back or release them. No one will ever hear from them again.

What if some of those prisoners should die in captivity? First, no one in America would ever hear about it, and second, even if the death were known, the guy is dead, and so there is nothing any US court could do about it.

Are all these horrible scenarios what the Founding Fathers wanted when they wrote the Constitution? Is this the American system of justice?

TRUMP’S INSIDIOUS PLAN FOR EL SALVADOR

By dismissing charges, he could keep them there forever.

Trump was under pressure to bring Garcia back from El Salvador, but needed an excuse to save face. He conjured up a grand jury to indict Garcia on some charges, knowing that ‘a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich.’

Trump’s TACO image is on full display here. I’d like to add some letters to the acronym, but I fear you could come up with something better than this: TACO-SHOW (Says He Only Won). That is, even when he chickens out, he declares victory.

So now Garcia is back facing trial. I’d think any judge in his right mind would dismiss the charges, since there is no way Garcia can get a fair trial. Think of it – the President of the United States goes on national TV, saying what a horrible person Garcia is and how he committed all sorts of heinous crimes. Trump went so far as to fake that photograph with the phony MS13 tattoo. And then there are these ‘witnesses’ who are in jail but have been offered some kind of deal to testify. They can hardly be credible. This is a kangaroo court if I ever saw one.

It is possible that charges will be quietly dismissed. After all, Garcia has been returned and Trump has saved a modicum of face. The case can be silently forgotten.

But what about all those other deportees in El Salvador? Why not press for extradition of all of them back to the US? That would really be a big loss of face for Trump. So he now has a really insidious plan.

Many of the deportees have criminal cases pending against them. They could be extradited to the US. But the Trump plan is to dismiss charges against them. That way, there are no charges to extradite them on. They can remain in the Gulag forever. Brilliant! They are anonymous to everyone except a few family members, so they can be quietly forgotten in their lifelong torture.

I hear no hue and cry about these remaining deportees. It rather looks as though Trump has won his battle. Does this mean that there will be more such deportations without due process?

In fact, if this new Big, Beautiful Bill passes, the Republicans will guarantee that Trump & Co. cannot be held in contempt of any court, that is, he can ignore any court order, and deport as many innocent people to foreign hellholes as he wants, with total impunity. And his MAGA cultists will cheer him on.

DON’T CALL THEM ILLEGALS

I shouldn’t feel the need to write this, as everyone should be aware that ‘undocumented’ is not the same thing as ‘illegal’. Most of these immigrants crossed the border and applied for asylum. Because of the huge backlog of cases, they are released – legally – until their asylum hearing, which may be a year or two away. They are expected to report to Immigration Offices periodically to check in. This is the legal process.

In fact, under Biden the Congress tried to pass a law increasing the number of immigration judges and officers, in order to speed up the process, but Trump forced his GOP minions to vote it down. Trump wanted all those immigrants in the country in order to promote his anti-immigrant campaign.

So now, ICE shows up at the Immigration offices, where the legal immigrants are legally checking in, and arrests them, detains them, and prepares to ship them off to the torture camps in El Salvador or South Sudan.

Most of these legal immigrants are hard-working and have no criminal records. The very fact that they show up to check in at the Immigration Office is proof that they are legal. They are arrested anyway, and I see posts like this on Facebook:

              MAGA: Good! Arrest those rapists and murderers and ship them out.

Journalists:  But they haven’t committed any crime.

              MAGA: They are here illegally. That’s crime enough.

              Journalists: They are here legally.

The above conversation shows that one should use the word ‘undocumented’ to describe these legal immigrants.  Maybe ‘asylum seeker’ would be even better. Certainly NOT ‘illegal’.

ICE also barges into workplaces and arrests anyone who cannot produce documentation. These are mostly the ‘overstay’ immigrants. They are different from asylum seekers. Here is a description of the legal status of most of the overstayers detained by ICE, from workingimmigrants.com

civil violation vs misdemeanor vs felony in immigration law enforcement

Improper presence: If ICE arrests a person who has been in the U.S. for many years without committing any misdemeanors or felonies, but cannot provide evidence of legal status, they will likely face charges of civil violation of immigration law rather than criminal charges.  The person would likely be charged with being “unlawfully present” in the United States.

Therefore, even the word ‘criminal’ does not apply to these immigrants. But in these overstay cases, the word ‘undocumented’ applies.

Of course, there are many real illegals in the US, hiding under the radar. They are more difficult to find. What is starting to happen is that many legal asylum seekers are not reporting to their immigration appointments, for fear of being illegally arrested by ICE. The sad irony is that, by failing to appear, they become REAL illegals.

I should add that these masked ICE thugs usually do not have a judge-approved warrant to arrest anyone. They simply kidnap anyone they choose, call them illegals or criminals, and ‘disappear’ them. It could happen to anyone, especially anyone that Trump doesn’t like. It could happen to YOU!

WHAT’S GOING ON IN GAZA?

I wrote a couple of blogs over the past year, with the following hypothesis:

Hamas staged its massacre of Israelis in order to goad Israel into destroying Gaza. This would outrage the international community into finally wiping out the Zionists. To add to this strategy, Hamas stationed its troops in schools and hospitals, forcing Israel to bomb those hospitals and create humanitarian disasters. This would further enrage the international community.

For a while, the strategy worked, albeit with tremendous loss of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian lives. Iran sent missiles against Israel, but they were intercepted. The Houthis bombed a lot of ships, but recently they have been subdued. Lebanon and the West Bank looked as though they might join the all-out fray against Israel, but Israel shut them down.

Just a few months ago, it looked to me as though Hamas had lost, especially when Israel assassinated their top leaders.

However, I note a resurgence of anti-Israeli sentiment. Indeed, the anti-semitism has spread to violent shootings and murder of Jews outside the Middle East, notably in America. This is happening just as Israel has recently assassinated another Hamas leader, (n.b. based in a hospital in Khan Younis). There is now the usual outrage that Israel bombed a hospital, killing innocent women and children. But even that outrage grows stale and boring. The world has become inured to such daily violence. The media used to publish daily numbers of civilians killed, but that reporting seems to have stopped. Too boring?

Further, the original massacre of Israelis has faded from memory, as Israel continues to destroy Palestine. There is renewed talk of ‘disproportionate response’. Yes, the destruction of Palestine truly dwarfs the number of Israelis massacred by Hamas. However, I often ask Americans, “If Cuba sent just one missile into downtown Miami, what would the US do?”  Clearly that would result in the total destruction of Cuba.

At this point, Hamas’ main goal is survival. The longer they survive, the longer they can present to the world the image of brave freedom-fighters standing up against the evil Zionists.

The media are not giving us the straight story (Surprise! Surprise!). I’m not hearing, for example, whether there is any electricity or water supply in Gaza. Is there any semblance of government? Is there transportation? Are there shops open for business?

The key element is the tunnel system. Has Israel dismantled most of it? Bombing a building doesn’t destroy a tunnel. The tunnels permit Hamas to wage ‘whack-a-mole war’.

I don’t see any real solution, but I can venture a prediction at the short-term outcome. Israel can never accept a cease-fire, because that would enable Hamas to restore the tunnel system and return the war to square one.

TARIFFS AND DEPORTATION — SCOTUS MAY DECIDE IN TRUMP’S FAVOR

The United States Court of International Trade ruled that President Trump did not have authority to “impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world” and blocked Trump’s prized tariff program. Normally, only Congress can enact tariffs, but Trump had argued that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) gave him the right to introduce the tariffs because the United States economy was in an emergency. What the court ruled was, in essence, that this is not an emergency, and even if it was, the tariffs were not correctly dealing with it.

Trump’s lawyers immediately announced their intention to appeal the decision, and it will probably go to the Supreme Court. Their arguments are twofold.

  1. This is an emergency. “These deficits have created a national emergency that has decimated American communities, left our workers behind, and weakened our defense industrial base – facts that the court did not dispute,”
  2. The courts have no right to define what is or is not an emergency, and in declaring that the tariffs are not dealing with the situation, the courts are deciding economic policy for the country. “It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency.”

So one must ask whether there is a legal definition for ‘emergency’. In fact, the IEEPA actually spells it out: there has to be a threat to national security, foreign policy, or the U.S. economy; the threat must be “unusual and extraordinary;”

However, this definition leads circularly back to definitions. Who defines what is a threat, or what is ‘unusual or extraordinary’?

This is where the Supreme Court may step in. Trump’s buddies may agree with him that only he, and not the courts, has the right to define – as arbitrarily as he chooses — an emergency and how to deal with it.

Immigration

Normally, all persons in the United States, citizens or not, have the right to due process. However, Trump has cited an ancient law that says that due process may be waived if the United States has been invaded by a foreign country. He has invoked the Alien Enemies Act. passed in 1798 when America was feuding with France. It permits the president to summarily detain and deport citizens of countries with whom America is at war. 

Trump’s ICE rounded up Venezuelans and deported them to El Salvador, on grounds that Venezuela had invaded the USA and that we were at war with them. Here’s the wording of the AEA:  “[w]henever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government.”

The lower courts ruled that there was no ‘invasion’ and that the USA was not ‘at war’ with Venezuela, and therefore the deportations without due process were illegal.

Similar to the tariff arguments, Trump claimed that the court was overreaching; only the President can determine whether there is an invasion or not. Apparently, if a single Venezuelan sets foot on American soil, the President may consider that an invasion and start deporting thousands of Venezuelans to horrible gulags overseas.

The Supreme Court punted the first time around, but the matter will still come back to them. They will have to determine who has the right to define an ‘invasion’ of the USA, and they may well decide that Trump is the only person with that right.

There may be other cases in which the issue boils down to “Who gets to define *****, the courts or the President, or some other body?”

CAMBODIA’S S.T.E.M. PROBLEM

Let’s face it – STEM education in Cambodia is terrible.

First, some statistics: Countries the world are ranked by PISA scores of 15-year-olds in math and science. Of 81 countries measured (Africa excluded), the average score is 472, while Cambodia scores 336 in math and 347 in science – in both cases dead last, far behind its nearest competitors Dominican Republic and Uzbekistan, respectively. Neighboring Vietnam comes in at 469 and 472, respectively.

PISA itself says:

Since a high ranking on PISA corresponds to economic success, researchers have concluded that PISA is one of the indicators of whether school systems are preparing students for the 21st-century global knowledge economy.

OECD, the organization behind PISA, has published a list of 10 steps that a country may take to improve their PISA scores. www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-i_53f23881-en.html.  I won’t delve into these here. Rather I want to suggest another reason for Cambodia’s abysmal results.

My two opening paragraphs show a vicious cycle between school STEM education and university STEM education. Students do poorly in school math, and they graduate, saying, “I hate math and can’t do math.” So they won’t go into math at university level. With no university math graduates to teach high school math, the quality of school teaching is reduced to cook-booking through a textbook and memorizing some definitions and formulas without understanding them.

Poor school education leads to poor higher education which then reinforces the weakness of school education.

This vicious cycle also applies to other quantitative-oriented subjects, like accounting and finance. If university graduates in finance do not even understand compound interest, who is going to teach it to high school students?

I saw a useful solution to this problem in the tiny African country of Lesotho. They imported dozens of American Peace Corps Volunteers to teach math and science. These were STEM graduates from American universities. By teaching real math and science to remote mountain schools, they partially broke the cycle. We had actually real math and science majors at the National University of Lesotho, and most of them went into teaching.

It’s pretty embarrassing to compare Cambodia with Lesotho.

It must be said that Cambodia’s PISA scores have improved. They had been even lower at the previous measurement. Private schools are advertising their STEM programs to attract more students, but many of those STEM programs are just sham window-dressing – buy some fancy lab equipment to show off but never use, or pretend that your students are winning international gold medals (kind of like all those beers). At least, there’s an attitude that it’s good to excel at STEM subjects. That attitude may foster greater interest and incentive in those subjects.

Cambodia must address this problem seriously. The country risks falling behind the rest of the world in science-based achievement. We live in the age of the ‘knowledge economy’. Cambodia must either keep up with this trend, or else be relegated to a producer of agricultural products and other commodities.

WAS BIDEN TREATED?

First, I should say that I find the many attacks on Joe Biden in bad taste. He is no longer a political threat to anyone, so there is no reason to drag his name in the mud. Let’s just drop the matter.

Here’s what I, along with most average Americans, have concluded about the Biden situation, based just on what we hear on the news:

1.Cancers don’t just metastasize into the bones overnight. He must have had this cancer for quite a long time.

    2. Every President’s health is closely monitored with frequent and thorough check-ups. Prostate cancer is one of the first things they check for. His doctors must have known about the cancer and kept it hidden.

    Question:  could the doctors have kept the diagnosis hidden even from Biden himself? Is it conceivable that Biden didn’t know about his own cancer until May of 2025?

    These observations will not change anything; it’s all water under the bridge. There is one issue, however, that should be investigated. That is, if the doctors knew of Biden’s condition and kept it hidden, it looks as though they made no attempt to treat him. That i

    is, they allowed the cancer to progress to an advanced stage without doing anything. In fact, they may have even kept it all secret from Biden himself. I find this behavior reprehensible, and it may even be criminal if the doctors opted not to try to save Biden’s life.

    If true, this is behavior that both Republicans and Democrats should roundly condemn. But when Trump & Co. Try to make political capital from it, and the Democrats push back, the issue becomes relegated to just one more partisan standoff, where each side accuses the other of lying.

    I’m surprised that I’m not hearing in the media any comparison with Woodrow Wilson. He had a stroke during his Presidency, and was basically a vegetable during those final days. But his followers propped him up in bed and pretended that he was still compos mentis.

    In the Biden case, the government was able to continue running without the public suspecting the truth. Why? Because the President had intelligently selected his cabinet and advisers and Vice-President so that the team could carry on the work. That’s actually an important quality of a good leader.
     

    If anything should happen to Donald Trump, could we expect his cabinet and advisers and Vice-President to competently and efficiently carry out the running of the government?