Why English Classrooms should be Liberated from the Imposters...

Manu Kurup

Oct 20, 2025

3 min read

Recently, at an academic event where I was invited to give a talk, I seemed to have unsettled a few people. My offence was simple. I stated that anyone teaching English at the Diploma Programme level must hold a Bachelor’s degree in English, not just a convenient post-graduation picked up from an obscure university. Someone later told me that I had been impolite. That may be true. Yet my so-called impoliteness was deliberate, and I stand by it.

English, more than any other subject, has become a playground for impostors. It is the only discipline where people with no academic grounding in it can still find a way to acquire a postgraduate degree. You cannot do a Master’s in Chemistry, Physics, Economics or Business with a BA in English, but for some reason, the reverse seems entirely acceptable. The absurdity of this practice speaks for itself.

English Language and Literature is not a casual list of stories and poems strung together for sentimental reading. It is a structured field of study that demands a foundation in linguistic, critical and theoretical frameworks. A BA in English equips a student to read with method, to analyse with precision and to interpret meaning with intellectual depth. Without that grounding, what remains is imitation. The classroom becomes an act of performance, not pedagogy.

The school system in India has treated this with astonishing carelessness. During my tenure as a head, I have seen résumés that belong more to farce than to education. People with backgrounds in Computer Science, Economics and Business suddenly appear with an MA in English from some candy-ass university that no one in the academic world recognises. They walk into interviews full of confidence, proclaiming their undying love for Shakespeare, as if the mere mention of his name could grant them legitimacy.

There was one memorable interview. I gave a candidate a well-known soliloquy from Coriolanus and asked her to identify it. She began a detailed analysis of Julius Caesar’s mind. It was tragic and comical at the same time. When someone cannot tell Coriolanus from Caesar, they are not a teacher of literature. They are a tourist who lost their way in a library.

This is not a harmless problem. It is a serious breach of academic integrity. International schools in India charge parents exorbitant fees for the IB Diploma Programme. They do so with the promise of high-quality teaching and genuine scholarly expertise. English Language and Literature is one of its core subjects. It is unacceptable that schools hire people with counterfeit qualifications to teach it. The damage extends beyond the classroom. It diminishes the value of the programme, betrays the trust of students and parents, and insults English as a discipline.

Throughout my career, I have seen how this masquerade continues under the comfortable illusion that enthusiasm for reading is the same as academic competence. It is not. The difference between a trained English teacher and a counterfeit one is the difference between knowledge and noise.

So yes, I was blunt, and I will continue to be blunt. If that bruises a few egos, so be it. English teaching at the Diploma level must be reclaimed from those who bought their degrees from universities that operate like souvenir shops. It must be restored to those who studied it with discipline and dedication. Until that happens, I will remain as impolite as necessary.