[Principal Peter] Bringing the Best of Western Education to Cambodia – without the cultural baggage.

Writer: Principal Peter Abram

Principal Peter

MISSION INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL CAMBODIA. Sunday November 16, 2025

For more than a thousand years, Western education and scholarship have played a central role in shaping modern global knowledge, economic development, and cultural advancement. From the establishment of the earliest universities in medieval Europe — such as Bologna, Oxford, and Paris — Western academia pioneered structured inquiry, peer review, and disciplines ranging from philosophy and theology to mathematics and empirical science. This tradition helped transition humanity from predominantly myth-based explanations of the world toward evidence-based reasoning, critical thinking, and the scientific method. As a result, countless breakthroughs in medicine, engineering, navigation, agriculture, and technology have their origins in Western academic inquiry.

Moreover, Western education has influenced the world not only through invention, but through ideas. Concepts such as universal human rights, constitutional governance, freedom of speech, academic freedom, democratic participation, and the belief that education is a public good rather than a privilege were developed, debated, and refined through Western universities, churches, and philosophical movements. The spread of literacy, public libraries, research institutions, and teacher-training colleges emerged strongly through Western reforms, promoting the idea that learning should be lifelong, transferable, and available to all social classes.

This same tradition has also produced many of the world’s most influential scientific and cultural achievements. Advancements including antibiotics, electricity, computing, aviation, telecommunications, and modern medicine grew out of Western academic and industrial environments. Likewise, global educational models — such as the liberal arts framework, scientific laboratories, professional qualifications, and international school accreditation — have become standards that many nations choose to adopt or adapt, not because they are Western per se, but because they are effective in encouraging innovation, mobility, and problem-solving.

In countries such as Cambodia, the contribution of Western education can be valuable when it is shared respectfully, contextually, and collaboratively. 

Western systems can support local students by strengthening critical thinking, creativity, independent research skills, English-language capacity, digital literacy, and global academic pathways. When combined with Cambodia’s cultural identity, values, and resilience, the partnership between Western educational models and local aspirations can empower young people not only to access global opportunities, but to become future leaders who contribute back to their own country and community.

Yet despite its remarkable history of contribution, it must be said plainly that Western education in its modern form is no longer performing at the level that once made it the envy of the world. In many countries, the institutions that once produced explorers, inventors, philosophers, pioneering scientists, world-class engineers, and disciplined scholars are now struggling to maintain basic academic standards. What was once known for excellence, resilience, intellectual courage, and personal responsibility is increasingly being defined by ideological sensitivity, emotional fragility, and a resistance to truth-based debate.

Decline in Standards and Loss of Purpose

Across many Western nations, literacy and numeracy levels are falling, university readiness is declining, and large numbers of students are progressing through school without strong reading, writing, or problem-solving skills. Instead of strengthening knowledge, accuracy, and rigorous thinking, too many schools have shifted toward therapeutic education, political activism, and identity-based narratives. In some classrooms, feelings are treated as facts, personal identity is prioritized over shared knowledge, and comfort is valued above resilience and discipline. This is not educational progress — it is educational surrender.

Confusion, Ideology, and the Erosion of Excellence

The result is a generation of students who are often less prepared for adult life, less confident in decision-making, and less capable of handling challenge or disagreement. When the focus of schooling becomes self-expression rather than self-discipline, and when protecting emotions becomes more important than pursuing truth, academic excellence will inevitably decline. What once built the world’s greatest universities is being replaced by a culture that confuses tolerance with truth, equality with uniformity, and compassion with intellectual weakness.

Warning for Nations Building Their Future

Countries like Cambodia would be wise to learn from both the strengths and the failures of Western schooling. The achievements of Western education are real, historic, and worth embracing — but the recent decline is equally real and must not be imported. Cambodia has the opportunity to adopt the best of Western academic tradition — critical thinking, science, creativity, and global communication — while firmly rejecting the worst of Western educational philosophy — entitlement, ideological indoctrination, cultural guilt, and the lowering of academic standards. 

An example of a once great Western institution forcefully directed into woke progressivism is the British Council. They were founded in 1934 when the UK Foreign Office entrusted them with the international promotion of British culture and values—all at the British taxpayers’ expense. They are still taxpayer-funded in part. Somewhere along the line, in the 21st century they abandoned that sacred responsibility in favor of focusing on the promotion of, among other Far Left projects, the celebration of Queer Pride. For evidence, follow their Instagram page or read articles on their site like ‘Language is a Queer Thing’. https://arts.britishcouncil.org/projects/language-queer-thing

It’s for Cambodians to decide for themselves if they want to partner with such an organization. 

Over the past few years there have been many new Western entrants to the education market in Cambodia. De Montfort, Invictus, Bromsgrove, Shrewsbury, Global Schools Foundation (via Harrods International Academy expansion who are Singapore-based but offer a Western-aligned curriculum), Reigate Grammar (whose student alumni include British PM Sir Keir Starmer), and many more. Including us, Mission International School Cambodia (MISC). We see the staff and teachers at the aforementioned organizations as our colleagues and wish you the best of luck as you face many of the same challenges we do. Perhaps many of us are strangers at the moment but a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet. 

So which way forward for all of us?

Sir Isaac Newton (pictured below) was a professor of mathematics at Cambridge University from 1669 until 1696. He gave lectures on the laws of motion, universal gravitation, optics and calculus. One has to wonder what he would have made of the recent appointment to Dean of College of Information, Science and Technology at Penn State, Andrea Tapia (pictured below). Ms Tapia began her rule of kindness by discarding the men and assembling an all-women leadership team. In every corner of the globe, Information, Science and Technology is a male-dominated industry. Some would argue that men tend to be more technically minded, have a greater capacity for logic and are more intellectually suited to STEM. Research shows men display higher spatial-reasoning ability. Okay, but as Christians we argue that God distributes gifts according to His purposes, and we seek to nurture calling, confidence, and opportunity for all. For biblical references see Galatians 3:28 ‘equal worth and calling’ and 1 Corinthians 12 ‘diverse gifts, one body.’ 

Suppose we agree with Andrea Tapia’s DEI philosophy and her quest to impose Equity on the STEM departments at Penn State. Is on Day One rejecting the men really a display of Equity? Or Diversity? Or Inclusion? Andrea Tapia has literally turned her back on half of the population. You’ll note how she, as they usually do, with her shaved and completely tattooed scalp, presents herself as a thuggish man. This radical feminism; it’s an unhealthy worship of masculinity. Because they are not male, female leaders of the Andrea Tapia ilk are primarily motivated by resentment. What could be more proof of resentment than a woman presenting herself as a thuggish man while kicking all of the actual men out?

There’s no place for this mentality in Cambodian schools and colleges. At MISC, Mission International School Cambodia, in STEM and all other subject areas we offer our girls the same opportunities, support, pathways and encouragement as the boys. Of course we do. If education is to remain a force for human progress rather than decline, it must return to what made it great: truth over trend, discipline over comfort, knowledge over ideology, and character over convenience. Cambodia and other developing nations now stand at a crossroads — either repeat the West’s recent mistakes or rise by learning from them. The future belongs not to the most fashionable systems, but to those that cultivate courage, competence, clarity of thought, and moral conviction. If we choose excellence with intention, we can build schools that do not merely produce graduates, but leaders — young men and women who are educated not only for employment, but for responsibility, purpose, nation-building, and global contribution. 

All educational organization, ultimately, tend to varying extents to be informed by some form of ideology. Penn State is progressive, woke and in my opinion, from what I read in their own publications, lost. 

At MISC we are a Christian school and completely unconfused about our key drivers and how we will embrace the rich traditions we’ve inherited and do all in our power to return Cambodia to its rightful place on the world stage. I don’t wish to be patronizing but my advice to my friends and colleagues managing and teaching in international schools in Cambodia is to do some soul-searching. Perhaps you walk a different path from us, and even though some of us are strangers now, I’m sure most of you are walking that path to reach a place where you’ll achieve many of the same outcomes for your students as we hope to here at MISC. Please feel free to contact me to discuss any of the points I’ve raised in this article. 

A stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet.  

petera@miscedu.org

Sir Isaac Newton

Andrea Tapia