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University Degree Requirement For EFL Teachers
An article (scroll down)I found on Tesall.com got me thinking about this. Certainly, in many countries teachers are in fact required to have a degree in order to obtain the proper work and residence authorization: my focus here is not on that fact but on this: is this a good requirement?
Can a person be a good teacher without a degree? Absolutely. Can most people without degrees be good teachers? Hard to say. Wanting to teach abroad is an important part of what makes someone potentially good at it. While TEFL a relatively popular field I’d be hard pressed to say that most people who don’t have degrees want to be EFL teachers, so it is not really appropriate to generalize.
Does having a degree mean someone will be a good teacher? Not really. But it is probably a good indication that the person has achieved some set level of education, and usually it also means they have passed through an established system successfully.
I think it is common knowledge, though, that there are plenty of people who get through university without developing critical thinking skills and conversely, plenty who don’t attend or finish university who do.
Individual schools may hope that requiring a degree will root out “backpacker” types, but this may be an outdated strategy as more and more people seem to decide to take a career break and travel and/or teach abroad, in many ways with a “backpacker” mentality. Having a college degree doesn’t seem to be the sign of settling into a career mentality that it once was.
I don’t mean to imply anything negative with any of these “categories” (for lack of a better term) of people I mention – while I most certainly recognize the value of a university education and in general think it’s a good thing for teachers to have a university degree, I don’t think it is the magic ticket to good teaching that is may be perceived as.
By Katie | Permalink
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All good points, Guy. If it wasn’t clear from my post, my intended focus is more “requiring a university degree doesn’t guarantee professionalism or quality” than “it’s unfair to have that requirement” or something.
Certainly countries look out for their own citizens first in employment, but it is also those same citizens who often want a blond-haired blue-eyed native speaker, and while a university degree often goes hand in hand with some level of professional competency, this connection isn’t automatic.
I agree that governments do often need to specify some requiements for employment of non-citizens. Requiring a university degree might be the simplest and most efficient way to do this, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. I’d say there are probably still plenty of local teachers who are better qualified than many EFL teachers with university degrees, and they are still displaced.
I agree, and actually, after posting, I had wanted to go back and write more. I took your post off-tangent, sorry. Gimme an edit button!
On topic - experience is the greater teacher. There is still a lot of room out there for people without degrees. About a quarter of our TEFL students have some college experience without the degree and they do just fine.
An editing button? What’s next - a password I suppose! I’m on to your plan, Guy…trying to take over the TEFL Logue. Watch out for this one, EFL bloggers… 
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One view not often taken or easily forgotten on the requirement of a degree is that it is a government that sets it, and not always a school. A common argument supporting the requirement of the degree, be it any degree or relevant to teaching is that any foreigner hired potentially displaces a local-born worker. While it’s easy to argue that a native-speaker is inherently more qualified than a local in teaching English, it is not an argument a government ministry can take for granted.
Such ministries need a minimum form of control and the degree requirement is the simplest such way to do it. After all, they are supposed to think first and foremost of their own population and re not there to serve foreign needs.
It is interesting that we can all probably agree such controls are needed in countries such as the US, Canada, and the UK, where ministries and departments of industry, human resources, and employment (and not Education) routinely fine tune and micromanage policy to fill labour gaps. Should we not expect the same of other countries?