I Was Hired As a Teacher…Then Asked To Join a Cult (Part 3)

How my international school in Thailand tried to force its teachers to join a Theravada Buddhist foreign educator cult...and why I'm concerned about the same thing happening in Massachusetts.

If you’d like to catch up on this story, please read part 1 and part 2.

During my second year at Panyaden International School, I and my other colleagues were fed up. Every day, the school preached ‘loving-kindness’, or Metta. But in back door conversations, the administrators were not kind. Folks felt like they were going crazy. In one meeting, an admin would say one thing; in the next, another. Anyone that was on the administration’s hit list would find that they weren’t informed of when meetings were, or were given an agenda that didn’t match what was discussed. Teachers again and again asked for processes to be streamlined and professionalized. When they weren’t, we chalked it up to incompetence.

Here’s part of an audio conversation between the Primary School Principal and the EAL (English as an Additional Language) team of 2 educators, discussing the EAL Coordinator position and our future training of TAL (Thai as an Additional Language) staff:

Here’s another discussing reading instruction and how to document student progress, plus an infuriating discussion of coteaching:

Fun fact: the American reading materials used by the school were later found, by the Sold A Story podcast, to be ineffective at teaching reading to native speakers.

But in hindsight, I believe it wasn’t a lack of understanding. Highly skilled, highly educated teachers — brought to the school to aid in gaining WASC accreditation — presented top-class research from some of the best education research institutes and universities. Many had been around the block in the international school industry, and had talked shop many a time at their foreign employers.

But Panyaden’s administration refused to listen to its educators. It felt like they were always saying, “We want to keep this messy. We want to keep this confusing.” I have to wonder: why?!

Enter the “homestay program”.

If you have gone to the website for Panyaden, you might notice there is no mention of this program. You would think they’d want to advertise all the good work they are doing with this charity project. The project is entirely funded by Austrian millionaire Erich Erber.

During my time at Panyaden, the school brought in through its ‘boarding program’ (later renamed to a ‘homestay program’ to avoid WASC asking too many questions about it) 15 students from incredibly vulnerable backgrounds. We were originally told that the students were ‘orphans’, but over time we discovered that many of these students did have living family who cared about them, and some were still in contact. The first cohort of students were brought from a Thai monastery. Though their learning might have been slightly interrupted, they had pretty decent academic skills. They came at an emerging level of English, but most were on the path to full English proficiency. The second group were from some of the most traumatic backgrounds imaginable. Some, we were told, had witnessed family members being killed, or had experienced living on the streets alone. Their schooling was incredibly limited, and the Primary school had no Thai-speaking counselor to help them adjust to being in an educational setting.

You can see on Panyaden’s website that Erich Erber is a powerful financier of the institution. He is not only on the school’s advisory board, he is also the creator of the Panyaden “Fresh Air System”. As far as I understand it, it’s just an air purification system, same as any other air purifier in Asia.

Erber was a founder and CEO of a company entitled “ERBER Group”, which specializes in “animal nutrition and health business”. It was acquired by DSM in 2020. After its acquisition, Erber started a new company called SAN Group. Its website says it is a “multinational corporation” with “a passion for: animal health, crop protection and nutrition, food safety, real estate development, as well as green energies”.

However, it also seems to have another side hustle: The Erber Family Foundation.

The Erber Family Foundation is synonymous with the “homestay program” at the school. Erich Erber’s vision for the program, or at least what I could glean through conversations with administrators, was for Erber to finance the tuition of the ‘homestay kids’ until they graduate or turn 18. They live in a house off campus, with boarding staff hired by the school. When EAL team members asked who their legal guardians were, the Primary School Principal was very cagey. Here is an excerpt from a final conversation I had with him where he claims “Erich Erber would not let them down”:

If you are a teacher who has been trained to be a mandated reporter, all of this should ring massive alarm bells. And it did for me. I brought up the ‘homestay program’ to WASC during an accreditation interview. It was only through me speaking up that the program was even mentioned, despite them receiving EAL services. Here is part of the interview of Student Support Services:

The ‘homestay program’ in recent years has turned into another unusual project: the Erber Kids Band. Made up of all my EAL learners that I taught personally.

I cannot say what Erber’s intentions are in all of this. But in my professional opinion…all of this is shady as hell, and most definitely exploitative.

When you’re in a cult, the cult keeps things messy on purpose. If you’re running around doing the cult’s bullshit — running from meeting to meeting, class to class, answering email after email — you are not actually thinking about policy. You’re not questioning what interests are being served.

It wasn’t until recently, reviewing all the audio conversations I had with the administrators related to EAL policy, that I considered that Erich Erber’s intentions could be potentially malevolent. And now, my goal is to get justice for my kids who have big dreams.

One day, I was helping my students Rita and Sophia write a story for a creative writing competition. The first chapter, they wanted to write about their character going on an airplane. Trained to encourage kids to “show, don’t tell”, I asked them to imagine what would be some sights they’d see on a plane, or what sounds they would hear. They informed me, though I should have known already, that they had never been on an airplane before. To aid them, we googled pictures of airplanes, and I told them my own experiences on one. We also read a children’s book about Beyoncé, and I played them the song “Brown Skin Girl”. In the end, they decided to remove the airplane ride, as they had little experience with it.

Here’s their finished work:

Will continue in Part 4!