The recent report from the first ever expat teacher to complete a contract at TBI Bekasi has attracted a great deal of interest and debate, as has the revelation that TBI has been pocketing its own teachers’ THR in a scam which must have netted someone tens of thousands of dollars in recent years. We would like to thank Bernard for his knowledgeable analysis of what laws TBI has been flouting. However, for sheer farce nothing beats the joke that it is the TBI Teen Teacher who Binsar hired.

TBI claims that it is a ‘premium’ language school though who believes this outside Head Office is hard to determine: the reality has never matched the hype at most schools, if any. In reality, TBI has been getting thrashed commercially by EF for many years and after Preece became Business Development Manager new schools stopped opening and then started closing. The ‘group fantasy’ of superiority and high prestige has been raising more and more eyebrows.

 We at this blog have long mocked TBI’s outlandish pretensions to excellence and quality, and our stance seems more justified than ever with the news that Binsar hired a nineteen year old kid who had come to Indonesia to claim his Facebook bride! How low can Binsar go? This teen teacher had no CELTA or TEFL certificate and had only done his O-Levels in the UK. The teen could not even conceivably have gone to Uni, but Binsar marched this ‘premium’ teen into his classroom and left him to teach!

One wonders where Binsar would draw the line with expat teachers. Are twelve year olds welcome to apply? No? How about a smart fourteen year old with a good reference from her Grade Nine teacher? Would he consider hiring a hologram of an expat teacher if they were cheap enough? Would he consider employing an Australian cockatoo as a Native Speaker if it could say, “Polly wants a cracker”? This abysmal tale only highlights how far TBI has sunk and how delusional its claims to respectability now are.