The neoliberal nightmare, IS-Manila, and the Philippine elite

“How did you manage to transcend the neoliberal nightmare that is the international school system in Southeast and East Asia?!” a sharp, progressive PhD Candidate in Sociology at Yale University recently asked me. “It’s America outside America. You get these impermanent placements of three years here, three years there, which feature no deep investment in the community, just transient profit-making, and provide no understanding of the local—all while being fed this bullshit discourse on global citizenship as if you’re worldly and knowledgeable, and it ultimately produces kids who feel they can speak on behalf of other cultures just because they happened to be stationed in cities temporarily by their parents’ multinational company that incidentally also sheltered them, providing them with transportation, apartments in gated communities, and tuition to attend these prestigious international schools where they only socialize with other kids in the same situation.”

“Oh yeah,” I told him, “living in Hong Kong during the boom of the 1990s I would attend sleepovers at age 9 at which each girl would show up with a different ‘industry duffel bag’ bearing the name of whichever investment bank her father happened to work for.”