LLT has a post on finding a school for her son which got me thinking on how my views on schooling have evolved since I started the same process myself. My position on the subject in the past was encapsulated in a discussion I had with Sangitha and which can be summarised as:
- Many of the facilities and interest classes that the new-fangled private schools offer are just that, extras, and unnecessary.
- The schools are too expensive.
- They will be full of wealthy kids of parents who can afford such fees, leaving the students with the skewed view of a world in which everyone’s parent owns a car.
In this sense, my views haven’t changed that much. I do believe that those facilities and interest classes are not strictly necessary. The schools are expensive, leading to children mixing only with a certain economic class.
However faced with the no-longer hypothetical situation of charting an educational future for my child, I have had to unpack some of my own instinctive reactions on the subject:
- While a child not taking music, horse-riding, and whatever else is on offer at the more expensive private schools will not be a huge roadblock in their progress through life, taking them is not bad either. To be fair, having the chance to do more of those talent-development things at school and less classes in which one simply memorises facts that may or may not be relevant to life is a good thing. If I’m very honest, I would have loved to be able to take horse-riding classes.
- I have to admit that I’ve been sceptical about the pedagogy and education style at some of the new schools, which as per my understanding at the early stages tends to be
namby pamby play-based and at the later stages remains loose, exploratory and less rigorous. I was prey to the stereotype of those Americans who can’t do Math properly versus us Indians who are math geniuses. This stereotype is propagated in the mass media even in the West, but first-person testimonies seem to say otherwise. The whole idea is pretty laughable seeing as I excelled in the Indian system but pretty much had no idea how to change decimal points till Standard X.
Moreover, common sense and a lot of research points to children, at least the young ones, learning through play and exploration and that rote memorisation is not of great use and can actually put people off learning for life. The traditional Indian education system seems to prepare children for the traditional Indian public exams, and so maybe the fear that children who go through the alternative schools might not get into or cope with universities in India is justified. However, it seems that universities in India now do accept students who have done an international certificate instead of a local one (correct me if I’m wrong).
- I have always thought the accents children come out of international schools with are pretty embarrassing. I now realise that one’s child “talking funny” and one’s own prejudice against people with foreign accents who one encountered in college do not count as good reasons on which to base school choice.
- Largely, my entire reasoning was based along the lines of “I went through that system and I came out pretty okay, so what’s the point of spending money on anything fancier?” But is this strictly true?
It is true that I came out okay. If I’m honest, my school education was mediocre but I came out of it able to cope with and sometimes superseding people who had all the right boxes ticked to do better than me internationally: they were white, went to prestigious international universities and therefore had both the education and the networks that these conferred.
There could be two reasons for this. I am unusually bright, and at the risk of sounding immodest, I kind of am. I look around me and I see a number of Indians doing well in Hong Kong and when I look even more closely a lot of them are among the brighter varieties of middle-class Indians and coupled with that, we have the big advantage of middle-class English education which is fluency in English. The other reason is that the Indian education system is so rigorous that once we survive it, everything else is cakewalk. I think there are other complicated reasons why Indians of a certain background (because at the end of the day, it’s a small minority of Indians who actually have the opportunity to go abroad at all) do well abroad and our schooling as a factor in our success may not be the dominant one.
If I look more closely at the education I received in school, it was no great shakes and some of it was downright erroneous. We had a few great teachers and I had my father who kept challenging me with ideas and I read like a maniac, but I doubt the actual education I received in school was very useful. I was mostly bored and read whatever I could get my hands on under my desk, or daydreamed. The subjects I was weak at like maths, physics and chemistry, I remained weak at. The subjects I was good at did not add to my knowledge greatly because I would pretty much finish reading those textbooks – English, history, geography – in the summer holidays as soon as they arrived and there was nothing more to learn.
Now take V at the other end of the spectrum. Like me, he thought school was a drag, but while I excelled at it, he barely scraped through. Professionally, he is more successful than I am though. What schooling did to him was more terrible – it killed the desire to read, to learn formally, to study further.
At school, I was often made to sit with girls who were failing academically, and I saw firsthand what a crap deal the education system was for them. I know some of them went on to do well. Others languished, but basically their time at school was not pleasant.
Two things strike me here:
a) It seems that if you’re bright, your schooling won’t hold you back. Thing is, parents can’t know beforehand whether their children are going to bright or not, though I’m sure we all are sure our babies are geniuses (geniii?). I would assume that a less rote-based environment would be better for non-academically inclined kids. I would also assume that it would be better for kids who academically excel. I’m pretty sure I would have been better off given more history books to read and projects to do (instead of reading Curly’s precious supply of Sweetdreams and Miss A’s religious magazines under my desk) and someone spent tried different approaches explaining decimal points to me, even if it meant keeping me back at maths. I may even have come out of school able to look at my own bank account without shuddering.
2) My overall impression of traditional Indian schooling (and traditional Hong Kong schooling is similar from all accounts) as we knew it is that it’s boring and a waste of time. The entirety of what we learnt in 10 years could have been squeezed into 5. Maybe schooling won’t scar my child for life. But at best, it’s very likely he’s going to be bored. Do I want him to be sitting somewhere memorising something that could be spent on learning something useful or even playing? Not really.
Now, the sad fact is that the schools that provide an environment where children explore instead of being confined are expensive. It could be that it is because they are expensive to run. Employing qualified teachers costs money. It’s very possible that there are people who are not qualified educators who are intrinsically good teachers. My instinct tells me that these paragons are few and far between though. So in the absence of innate talent, training might be a safe bet. It takes training and funds to run structured chaos. Ideally, there has to be a small class, high teacher-student ratio. This costs money. Maybe the government should be subsidizing this. I realised this when I visited one of the more reputed kindergartens here. They are very clear about their educational philosophy and training. The other kindergarten Benji got into I know for a fact employs white faces who are not necessarily trained. I don’t think the latter is a bad bet, it’s got a decent reputation and we might still go for it, but I won’t deny the reputed one looks like it’s reputation is warranted.
Conclusion of all this rambling: If you can afford the international/play-based/alternative school and the logistics work out, send your kid there.
If you cannot, back to my very first point. It’s not reason to panic. The traditional schools are okay. Also, I’ve been hearing that many of the traditional schools (both in HK and in India) are loosening up a bit and experimenting more. So, maybe there’s a win-win scenario of low fees, rejuvenated pedagogy there.
I used to be contemptuous of parents panicking over their children’s schooling. Although I still feel like there’s no reason to panic, because we do have options, this is an important area of your child’s life and it’s a choice one would like to give some thought to. So around the time kids are of school-going age, you will hear parents discussing this topic a lot. A lot of the time they are just venting or thinking out loud.
For non-parents, a primer on why schooling choice can get complicated:
- Possibly, we have more options today. There are more categories of schools to choose from. We have more income enabling us to choose.
- In Hong Kong, you have to choose between English, Cantonese, Putonghua, and bilingual education. Many expat parents don’t even consider non-English education. But if you do, it requires some research. It also requires you to project into the future, where you intend to be long-term, whether you can afford college education outside Hong Kong.
- In Hong Kong, places for English education are not abundant. So broadly there is competition for places, with a small number of children not getting a place at all anywhere and having to be home-schooled. Nothing wrong with home-schooling. Just that not every parent is up to it. Or can stay at home to do it. I have a feeling competition for English education has increased in India too as the middle-class expands.
- Among the English medium schools, there are different categories. In Hong Kong, it’s international (private schools), ESF (government subsidized but still expensive), full government subsidized “local” schools (extremely difficult to get into as they are the elite schools, often still have a Chinese language subject that foreign students would struggle to meet the level of), DSS schools (government subsidized with some flexibility in curriculum), etc. You have to research all these and figure out admission procedures. Again, most expat parents don’t look beyond international and ESF. In India, it would be the different boards to choose from.
- There are a lot of logistical things for parents to consider. Parents don’t have endless freedom in how much they can pay. Therefore, they hope their child will get admission to a school the fees of which they can afford. Then, parents don’t have endless flexibility in where they live. If your child only gets into a school way across town, then you have to either move, or have your child travel a long distance, and/or have yourself be further from work, all of which mean less time for parents and children to spend together.
- Moreover, kindergarten is only the start of the process. Parents would have to go through the entire rigmarole of admissions again for primary school and then for secondary school. Thus, kindergartens that feed into a primary which feeds into a secondary are the most prized. Can you blame parents for hoping against hope that their child gets into said kindergarten so they are saved this hassled over and over?
So what have I decided about my own child’s education (for now, this is an evolving story):
- I cannot afford the international school fees in Hong Kong. However, ESF should be considered more strongly than the local system, which by all accounts is very similar to typical Indian schools. If we move to India, I need to look at the international/alternative schools and see if they fit my budget.
- For kindergarten, I want a school that is reasonably close. I am willing to forgo the security of a primary school place by not sending my child far off. Maybe this is easier for me because I’m not sure we have a long-term future in Hong Kong.
- I prioritise morning school over afternoon school (kindies here run two sessions). I’m pretty sure Benji is going to be offered an afternoon ESF place while he already has a morning place at a less nice kindergarten and that makes my choice very difficult. I can tell that the ESF school is a great school. The one he currently has admission to is an average one. Is it worth it shifting his nap? Both had pros and cons that would take too long to list.
If I pick the original kindergarten and not the ESF one, I know I am not picking the best school for my child. But it would the choice that we believe works best for us as a family, given our finances, future plans, current location, etc and which we think is good enough. I don’t think as parents we have to believe we are picking the “best” option in the market for our kids. I won’t diss the other great options out there either just because I didn’t pick them . The best option may not work for us.
Update:
Update: Last week, I attended a playdate at the ESF kindergarten which has resolved matters in my mind. I appreciated that the format was a free play session for the children accompanied by the parents, and not an interview. The teachers made it clear that they simply wanted to observe the children interacting naturally. Nevertheless, I found it a bit unnerving. Did not help that Benji clammed up as usual, was probably the youngest and least loquacious of the kids there, and is still a very drooly kid with a cold that made this worse. The teachers came around and informally chatted with the parents, though they did ask some targeting questions like “why are you choosing this school” (something I should have been prepared for, but was a bit thrown by as I was involved in a sandpit installation at the time) and “how involved are you prepared to be”. I would have thought I was being overly nervous but another parent who I shared a cab with after the session also said he felt a bit unnerved by the observing teachers. Anyway, this is the most sensible format for evaluating kids, and for that the school gets points.
Nevertheless, something struck me as off. My instinct was to identify it as the “whiteness” of the experience (meaning, the teachers, parents and even kids are mainly white people), or more specifically the dominance of the Western viewpoint and the confidence in its unassailability. This school, by virtue of catering to primarily children from native English-speaking families, is one of those expat havens, and as someone who has consciously always lived in very Chinese areas, and now works in a very Chinese environment, I find it disconcerting. On the one hand, doing so has exposed me to the good, bad and ugly of Hong Kong culture to the extent that I have decided we might need to leave soon. One solution to that might be to ensconce myself in exactly the kind of expat ghetto lifestyle that this school offers. On the other hand, I (and my wallet) resist that too, at least in terms of where we live. But then, I have to confess that in India, I didn’t exact a lifestyle that was one with the masses either (http://thebluebride.wordpress.com/2012/10/09/passage-to-india-1/). I have never completely been an insider in India (http://thebluebride.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/being-indian-2/). Though Indian culture is more welcoming of outsiders, I believe. I am aware that this has only little to do with the original topic of school. For schooling, I am possibly willing to suspend my need to integrate.
More to the point, on paper this school ticks all the right boxes. On second impression, it is not as perfect as I had initially thought. Which kind of makes my decision easier, that is, if Benji gets a place and I even have a decision to make.
My Amma has been a teacher is about 5 schools all varying from so-called international standards to those having children of uneducated parents who are trying to get their children to study
She feels that a child will learn in any school if she/he really wants to learn..my father attended a Tamizh municipality school till he was in class 10 because his parents couldnt afford to send him to school..but he is a PhD double IITian…my mother studied in a Tamizh medium school in Calcutta till her class 5 and now is a great English teacher..
For me these are examples enough that being in vernacular medium or studying in a municipal school is not going to decide your learning..
Then someone asked me why wasnt I sending R to a municipal school here in Bombay…the problem now with municipal schools here is that the teachers are not there, there are no facilities there is nothing which will excite my child to study…
I have realised that a school is mainly made through the kind of teachers it has, not whether they offer horse riding and golf playing (those are lovely facilities I agree!)
But at the end of the day, the person who influences you the most especially when you are young is your teacher..whether is bad or good, is debatable!
I have put R in a middle class school..which is predominantly filled with Gujaratis…I have gotten reports that the kids there speak only Gujarati and no English..R can speak 5 languages (not good in any one!) When I go to her school, her teachers speak impeccable English adn insist on speaking to the kids only in that…Does the board matter? I dont think it does…I have studied in the Gujarat board and I havent turned out bad at all..
Bottom line – If you want to study or have the inclination to study, you would do it anywhere…as long as the teachers in a school are good, I wont bother about the facilities..
Sorry, I wrote a mini post eh?
I did too
Im getting dangerously used to doing this on this blog. I cant help it thought! Most of The Bride’s post get me really thinking, and sort of like I am having a mini monologue here..
Tee hee, I take long comments as a compliment. Okay, I love long comments and I’m a longform commenter myself. Warning, long comment in response:
“She feels that a child will learn in any school if she/he really wants to learn” I’m not sure what that means, R’s Mom. Does that mean that the girls I sat next to who were failing and struggling with the curriculum did not want to learn? I don’t think that’s the case. I could see first-hand that she did not understand, and probably a teacher in a class of 50 did not have the time to coach her individually (a 1:50 ratio is considered terrible by international standards) , nor could I, her fellow student go back through all the basic concepts they had not understood to make her understand.
Does that mean that I, excellent student who presumably “wanted to learn” learned? Yeah, I learned but my grouse is that I did not learn enough. I learned the history of Shivaji and the Marathas/ Indian indendence struggle for five to seven years in a row when I wanted to learn the history of the Mughals and Tipu Sultan and Burma and the rest of the world as well. I think the system shortchanged both me, the great learner, and my partner, the girl struggling to understand and V, who quite possibly had learning difficulties and who basically got hit with a stick.
Yes, it’s true that exceptional students will learn in this system. Dr Ambedkar learned so much, even though he was denied education being a Dalit, because he was determined to learn. But are we expecting every student to be an extraordinary person like Dr Ambedkar? I think we’d do better to meet students at least halfway and provide the best possible conditions for learning so that even the less extraordinary ones will learn and that even those who do not “want to learn” are inspired to learn.
I wonder what the school your father attended was like? Was it like the municipal schools now? Was it better? Even you say you wouldn’t want your child in a municipal school. So it seems like a matter of degree. You are willing to opt for a school that you consider simple and basic, but not as simple and basic as a municipal school. Other parents would not want to go as simple and basic as you, they want more facilities/options that will excite their child to study, as you said.
“I havent turned out bad at all” That’s what I used to say. But is this true? We didn’t turn out bad but could we have turned out better? Hard to say. Could we have been happier in school? I definitely think I and many others could have.
I agree that good teachers make a world of difference. Schools that have a good reputation tend to have good teachers. They are the backbone. I know that in Mumbai many of the good teachers that worked in government subsidized convent schools are now moving to the private ones, because they cannot live on the government salary, and the students are moving with them. But I also think those kind of great teachers are not that plentiful. That’s why curriculum is important, teaching material that can help and give ideas even to the lesser, not-so-experienced teachers. Offering students different classes is only going to help them explore other interests, if you can afford a school that offers that, why not? Some of us explored these interests because our parents enrolled us in classes after school, others never got a chance at all. If it’s in school itself, then it might be more convenient. It might also give the impression that something like music and sports is as important as the stuff you learn in a book.
Having no kids, everything I say/feel about this is hypothetical, but based very firmly in what I experienced. I went to a mainstream (read: rote learning, no “extra curricular activities, etc) school right through until 9th grade. I think I was above average in terms of intelligence and grasp of what was being taught to us because even thought the teaching was sub-par, I was always in the top three ranks. This, despite being bored out of my skull and never having an interest in learning beyond what was taught and just doing the bear minimum from memory and what little effort I was forced to put in. My parents never worried about my grades because they didnt need to, but they did worry a LOT about the fact that by the time i reached the 9th grade (particularly between grade 4-9) I gradually lost the will to do anything outside the ordinary. I didnt want to read, participate in things, be vocal, explore other interests outside of school (something they always encouraged us to do). I was basically a bored jaded 15 yr old in 9th grade, getting decent grades. Most parents couldnt have asked for more, but they decided enough was enough and pulled me out and put me into an “alternative school” where we had no uniforms, no timetables, no bells ringing and attendance being taken. It was the other end of the spectrum — the school was a Steiner school. And in the last 2 years of my schooling I blossomed like never before. IN addition to doing well academically, I was enthusiastic about everything, curious about current affairs, science (which I hated before), and to use a cliche, it basically gave us a much more wholesome and well rounded schooling, beyond just learning by rote to pass exams. I did my 10th grade exam from the National Open School, which was considered at par with all the other boards and I had no issues getting into an international school for 11th and 12th grade — which I studied in the ISC board, simply because it gave me the option to pick and choose what I wanted (Fine, Art, Music, Literature, Sociology and History).
I hate to be overly idealistic, but I think my schooling did very little that was of great use, and even that it didnt do well. Youre right when you say the grueling 10 years can very easily be crammed into 5 and made much more interesting. But the truth is across India (save a few new examples in alternative schooling) it is not.
Bottom line: I turned out okay. Academics was never an issue, but more than that those 2 years in alternative school taught me never to settle in something just because it is the thing to do. WHich is what I was sort of settling into with the prev school. And that leanring is something that has and will be my approach to life. It has stuck by me in all my choices and forced me to do somethings and take a few chances I dont think I would have.
Picking a school, to me, is so much more than the academics. Children learn one way or another, theres no way to stop that. But what else can you feed them with that can contribute to them being better, grounded, whoelsome individuals is what I will probably consider. Maybe because of my personal experience, I have zero faith in mainstream schools. Perhaps they will change by the time I am ready to have my own babies, but I am probably still going to lean towards home-schooling/alternative schooling, because I have experienced the difference it makes.
That should have been: *Fine Art, Music, Literature, Sociology and History
Wow, interesting to read your experience. I went through something similar, though I retained my curiosity, around that age and I distinctly remember a conversation with my parents where my dad asked me whether I wanted to drop out of school. (No option of alternative school considered in my household!) I said no, because I wanted to go to college, and I’m glad I stuck it out because college, at least Arts in Xavier’s, was everything school was not.
Okay, have to say that when we were in school there was this big stigma around NOS as being for the weaker kids who couldn’t cope with school and the rumour was that they would have problems getting into the good colleges. How bourgeois we were! But if you had options in your day, I’m sure there’ll be much more by the time our kids get to that stage.
That stigma was around when I did it too. And it is just that, stigma. With no logical reason why anybody and everybody shouldnt opt for it. My folks were aware of the stigma, and in fact the rest of my family wrote them off as completely IN.SANE for pulling me out of school in std 9. But as you can see, I turned out quite alright — went to mainstream high shcool, went to college, worked for 6 years. And now am happy that I had the sort of foundation that tells you its OKAY not to be cut out for what the world deems “normal”
Okay follow up question on NOS. Did you find it hard to prepare for that exam and thereafter ISC having been in the Steiner system for a couple of years. I always wondered how kids who went to the other school systems managed to make themselves do the requisite mugging for the public exams.
Replying to Bride/Sangithas follow up question here because I cant seem to hit Reply there..
I was in the steiner school for two years, the last 10 months or so of which I was preparing for the NOS exam, which is to say I bought their course work and studied out of those books, but the rest of my school routine was same as before. The standard of the NOS exam itself wasn’t very great back then, in comparison to ICSE, I would say this was at par with the state syllabus. I managed it like a breeze because most of it I had already studied in some form or the other in regular school activities (including lab work done in a teachers kitchen!)
In fact, I even took a year out after 10th grade, to figure out what stream I wanted to go into. I did really well in everything, and I didnt want to jump into science just because I had the grades for it — because I well and truly detested the subject.
The transition to ISC by itself wasn’t tough, but that could also have been because I went to a really good school (Mallya Aditi intl School) which I picked only because it let me do music and art as subjects. Academically it was probably amongst the best years of my life, after the 2 years in Alt shcooling. But it is one of those unnecessarily pish-posh schools like the one Bride spoke about where every child comes from such an affluent background that holidaying in Switzerland is passe and coming to school in a beamer is the norm. I was a total misfit in that atmosphere, made very few friends and spent most of my time really studying, reading, and indulging in my music and art, because I discovered I loved it during this time.
My sister however had an entirely different experience. She has a severe learning disability, which funnily wasnt discovered in regular school, where she was constantly harangued into performing like every other child (because of course all kids are alike and MUST be able to do everything alike!). She was much younger when we joined the alt school and a few months into that they discovered she had a SLD (special learning disability) which she was tested for and diagnosed with. She took her NOS exam in 3 parts (the system allows that also) and for the last 2 years was schooled entirely at home by my parents. For the harder subjects like science and something else (i dont recall now) she had a private tutor who she would visit three times a week, but the rest was entirely done at home by my folks, through not just text books but active learning, hands-on experimenting etc..
She went on to study fine art immediately after 10th grade, because she was that dead sure of herself, and is now a sculptor living and working in Bombay..
PS: Bride you should change your reply settings so the chain doesnt end after 4-5 comments.. Go to settings > Discussion > Other comment settings and change the number for “Enable threaded (nested) comments XX levels deep ” and set it to max, I think its 10.
Thanks, that’s really helpful and encouraging for parents who are considering alternatives to the traditional schools. With regard to your sister, of course the traditional schools would have pegged her as lazy/stupid/difficult and never thought of checking for difficulties. It is a violence and an injustice but, you know, such are things in this system we say is good enough.
Ooh and thanks for the settings tip.
I realise I also said BEAR minimum..not a very good reflection of my schooling eh
Please excuse all typos. Im usually anal about it but when I am hyper and want to say it all, I type away in a frenzy. Bah. Must. Slow. Down.
I’m usually super careless on this blog, so no worries
Waiting for the answer to The Bride’s q on how you found ISC after NOS…thanks in advance, hAAthi!
And a like button for the comments. hAAthi, loved hearing from you on this. As a special educator, gives me hope for the kids I will work with…hope to do that in the school setting sincerely, without labeling. Thanks a lot – this comment was super useful in more ways than one!
Gone around a circle and a half on this. And then a few triangles. No closer to a real answer. Education is super important. Teachers are THE most important. If they are competent is nice, falling standards…no, make that creeping standards!
That they aren’t sensitive and able to help my children manage the more important things in life like dealing/coping with it and learning to learn is what I have become inflexible on. Such ideal teachers are more likely to be in a place that values them, including paying them enough (not always but sometimes in the right expensive school with the right values in implementation – not brochure/PR!) and giving them the freedom, supervision and training to be professional and warm teachers.
Are all these expensive schools such havens? Need to answer that question? On the other hand, my conventional school where I didn’t know what I learned but didn’t know what I missed either had maybe 2 out of the many teachers I interacted with who I remember fondly. I can re-learn with my kids (you kinda have to, whether you like it or not) but can’t undo the damage caused by insensitivity as easily.
Activities so help my kids. Good, new-fangled sports that is treated as the science it deserves to be. Good old fashioned music. Everything else is bells and whistles – my opinion, okay to have, quite okay to not have.
Show me such a haven, could you please? Will move the heavens to get there!
Wow reading that post and my comments is pretty dramatic evidence of my change of position on this issue. Even offering sports properly rather than some lethargic PT stuff, or music requires some infrastructure which costs money and requires space.
Weirdly, I thought you had found such a haven and was going to knock on your door if we move.
Think we might have to make ourselves one! What I had (do note tense change) works for some…not dissing it. Can’t accept either.
Eep, sorry to hear that!
Replied to your NOS Q in a slightly misplaced fashion because I couldnt hit reply. You might not get the notification, so letting you know here
The link to where we discussed schools is this one – http://lifeandtimesinbangalore.wordpress.com/2011/09/14/a-reply-to-a-school-post/
Oooh thanks, updating it in the post.
I recently read an article on choosing pre school,which gave me an interesting perspective.Sharing the link below
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/the_kids/2013/01/how_important_is_preschool_if_you_are_researching_early_education_philosophies.html
Haha, that really sums it up, doesn’t it? The point about how lower-income kids might need pre-schools really hit home as the Hong Kong government is considering introducing mandatory and free kindergarten. Right now it’s subsidized, maybe parents with less income struggle even with that fee. However, it seems that the better schools tend to go private and therefore exempt from the government scheme, leading to inequality in education. In Hong Kong, an added layer is that the government-subsidized ones are in Cantonese; for English-medium pre-school one would have to shell out a load of cash, which again means that the lower income kids who really need this extra exposure to English (since they wouldn’t get it at home) lose out.
Some further thoughts with reference to the article:
1. In Hong Kong and I believe in India, there is less attention to detail when choosing methods. So all those mentioned in the article would be lumped in the category of “alternative” and the rest would be traditional. Parents are broadly concerned with whether the teaching method is more relaxed and exploratory (Waldorf/Steiner/Montessori/play-based) vs traditional methods which involve rote learning and worksheets sent home. I wonder if the article takes into consideration these broad differences; maybe the traditional types that we commonly see here don’t exist in the US anymore.
2. The biggest concern for parents is getting into primary school. Not sure about India but in Hong Kong, a kid who has not gone to kindergarten will have a hard time getting into a primary school. Thus, the kindergartens that are linked with a primary school are the hardest to get into. It is less parents being over-concerned about their toddler’s education as them trying to save themselves the hassle three years hence. Also, according to some primary school teachers who have seen children who haven’t been to kindergarten/pre-school, they have a hard time coping (not just academically but with the social system, rule, etc. in school) because the other kids would have already gone through that phase in kindergarten. Now kids go to “playgroup” pre-kindergarten so one is in the even more bizarre situation of putting one’s kid in playschool simply because when the time for kindergarten comes, they would be the only kid who is not used to going to a class. Next we’ll probably have classes in-utero so they’re ready when they come out. I guess one has to draw the line somewhere, for me it was playschool till such time as I felt my son really needed it.
3. Which brings me to… do kids need it/does it give them a “head start”. I get what the article says in terms of no scientific proof that they do. I was skeptical myself and didn’t bother so far for Benji. However, we are fortunate to have a huge play area in our apartment and Benji does get to run about and engage with other kids there. Also, he has a baby sister. This is not the case for many in Hong Kong where kids are cooped up in small apartments, both parents usually work with a nanny at home who has other household duties too and single child families are the norm. Of late, I have been finding that Benji needs something more than the regular running around in various playgrounds all morning, especially because here kids are not always encouraged to socialise with each other, and so I just found a playgroup for him. So I can see that my child would benefit from an hour of so of semi-structured fun activity a day and maybe other parents saw this need earlier.
Nevertheless, reading that article was useful. If I factor out the need for a through-train primary school, it makes my choice easier.
we’re doing afternoon esf even though it meant having to sacrifice the afternoon nap and it’s turned out absolutely *awesome* for all concerned. the kid loves it to pieces and is picking stuff up at a gallop (i guess the whole play thing suits her), and it’s a bonus for us because she’s ready to drop by 7.
Ooh, nice to get that perspective and now, you’ve confused me all over again. Though our kids being asleep around 7 doesn’t work for us because that’s what we get back from work. As it is, we only get an hour and a half with them when we get back. Though I’ve also heard from parents that the kids nap when they get home pushing back their bedtime.
Point of view of a (current) international school student here.
In Malaysia, there are around five types of schools. The vernacular schools which teach most subjects in Tamil/Mandarin but still follow the national school system;the national schools which teach Maths and Science in Malay and have average reputations; the national schools which are as good as private schools but are governemnt-subsidised; the private schools which follow the Malaysian curriculum; and international schools, the majority of which follow the British curriculum.
Some international schools(like mine) only go up to the 11th grade and after that you have to go to college to do A levels/IB/SAM. In Malaysia, after the 11th grade, most upper middle class/middle class students do A levels or their international equivalents because many of them want to study abroad or study in a twinning program. The lack of good Malaysian universities means that it has become almost a tradition for moneyed families to send their children abroad to study(usually to the UK), but unlike in India, those who study abroad usually come back, because a degree from a top UK university goes a longer way in Malaysia than it does in the UK. And the Malaysian government provides no-questions-asked scholarships for students who get into Cmabridge or Oxford or even soemtimes the LSE.
Do international schools make studying abroad easier? In my opinion, no. Private school students or students from good national schools do as well in their A levels than students from international schools.
This is a useful perspective to have as Malaysia is similar to HK in many ways I think. I had a very heated discussion recently with a poor friend who was only repeating some stuff she had found out for me from a teacher friend, who basically said seomthing like the HK local schools aren’t very good because students don’t get into the good universities abroad. It annoyed me no end because there is this expat mindset in HK that functions in ignorance of the local system or with very little info. The fact is that the local system is really diversified. And the Hong KOng Diploma of Secondary Education itself is accepted by overseas universities. So it’s interesting that you say that good national schools do as well in their A levels. Moreoever, there is this presumption that we all aspire or should aspire to send our kids abroad. Since I work in a university in Hk, and not even the most renowned one, I can say there are more than decent options here, though Oxford is always going to be Oxford. That said, I’m pretty sure I can’t afford the fees. But in terms of university education i feel that th options in HK and even in India (the elite unis) are very good. In the context of this post, I have to acknowledge that I could be saying this because I can’t afford it though at this point, that’s the way I feel. Maybe I will rethink uni education too.
I think all parents want to have their kids love school and learn as much as they can. Living in the US, we have testing scores for the schools, I am sure they exist in other countries as well. When we moved we looked at the schools and choose to live where we live, more expensive area in order to go to the local schools. Since we were able to do that we did not need to go to a private school for my kids. I have one in college, one graduating from high school and one entering high school next year. I would say for me I worked with my kids when they were younger to help them to be able to read and to read well. Reading comprehension is very important. The ability to read something once and remember the content serves them all. When my kids were small I would find books with themes of topics they liked in order to help inspire them to want to read. As they have gotten older we have gotten computer games to play that are math based, science or history topics that would encourage them to learn yet be about things they care about. I think it is important to remember we are our childrens first teachers and we can help them to stay interested and add items into there world to keep them pursuing knowledge. Not every child is meant for college, it is important to realize that learning a trade is just as valuable as going to college. One thing is certain, each child is different and what they need for their education will be different as well.
You know funnily, I used to think that it’s okay if kids don’t love school because I didn’t and I turned out fine. But then I thought, why wouldn’t I try to find a school that my child has a higher chance of loving since he’s going to be there for so long. And hence this whole train of thought.
Yeah my sis also has pretty good public school options in the US and I think that’s great. I agree that parents have a huge role, and fortunately my two-year-old already loves books. The problem with the Indian system and the Hong Kong one is, there is so much homework to do and stuff to memorise, doing the extra stuff that interests them becomes less and less possible. Nevertheless, I distinctly remember when my dad got a computer home in the 90s – we were one of the few families to have one – and I discovered Microsoft Encarta. I was addicted.
“Not every child is meant for college”. While I agree with this in principle, at least in India or even hong Kong, I wonder if that’s practical. First of all, the number of people with a Bachelors degree is huge… to extent that people are doing a Master’s just to distinguish themselves. It’s a bit ridiculous, people studying theoretical stuff they probably won’t use, that’s the way it is. To get a white collar job, you need a Bachelor’s degree. And the more manual jobs are so poorly paid one would not be able to live a middle-class life on it. So I see a Bachelor’s degree as a minimum my child should have, hopefully they can pick subjects they are interested in.
Im totally enjoing this discussion. Have to go backand re-read this and the other posts written sometime back.
Couple of points-in india/blore i would prefer to put my child in a school closer home than further even if the nearer school is not international or doesnt have all the ‘good to have’ factors as long as the teacher reputation is good which is a ‘must have’ factor for me. Once there i would see if he is happy going to school and how interested heis to learn new things. Im really not sure about the syllabus of state vs ICSE vs CBSE right now.
Another 3-4yrs down the line depending on his capabilities i might want to choose his board of education. *then* i would think of proximity again as the next factor and finally the ‘good to have’ extra curricular.
Also until he reaches his teens or atleasr until he’s 10yrs old i would prefer unstructured play with friends closer home than maybe sending him to any classes. There is always vacation time to introduce him to new hobbies and if he shows interest help him pursue. Like you said it would be a work in progress…
I studied in a mediocre school too and ours was only the 4th batch of state board exams -im not brilliant but i did get 68th rank in the SSLCboard exam -but no i didnt study that hard-i loved going to school. Liked my teachers-i still love meeting them even after nearly 20yrs…so that 1-1interaction matters to me. They motivated their students and there is a lot more than just studies that i learnt frm them. I dont think i can expect thatkind of 1-1 today in schools which is sad…so i wonder what might interest my child in learning ,reading and going to school…
Oops put a post like comment here!!
Ha! Realised not done yet.sorry for hogging your space but…
If i were out of the country especially like the onsite oppurtunities we have for a couple of years and such i would without much thought put him in an international school hoping it would help him cope with education here once we return.
Yeah, my criteria are similar to yours, especially for the kindergarten stage and maybe even early primary. If you can find a school that is nearby where peoples say good things about the teachers, I would go with that too, which is kind of what I’m doing. My sense though is that this is not always easy anymore, hence parents feel the need to send their kids a longer way.
About the boards, I don’t know much about CBSE. But between ICSE and SSC (state board) in Mumbai, I didn’t see much of a difference in teaching methodology. It was still one teacher in front of a fairly large class (slightly smaller classes in ICSE as they were private schools). Around the time we did our 10th, projects were introduced in ICSE but the larger pedagogical methods didn’t seem that different because it was like one project here and there not an overall exploratory method of learning. Basically, it seemed like ICSE students just had a bit more to mug up. Even as a schoolgirl, though, I could see their textbooks were better. I am conflicted on learning Shakespeare in school (as it seems a lot of them were just memorising answers to set questions about aspects of the play) but if it’s a choice between Shakespeare and some rubbish (with wrong English grammar here and there) that we had in our textbooks, I’d pick Shakespeare. So if I had a choice between ICSE and SSC, I’d pick the ICSC. But mainly I’m talking about skipping the usual CBSE, ICSE, SSC choices for the alternative/international school system.
I’ve been all for unstructured play until recently, when I saw that Benji is bored. He has too much unstructured play. I specifically noticed bcause we are trying to wean him off his pacifier and I know that when he is actively employed he doesn’t notice it’s not there. he gets whiny and asks for it when he’s bored. Chutku goes to daycare and I think this helps in this regard. My niece also goes to daycare in the US and they have a few activities in the day which are good enough, and my sis is even considering skipping kindergarten.
Although i find the number of extra classes kids do in Hong Kong ridiculous, when i think back when I was four, I was already doing piano twice a week and when I was nine, I started athletics every day. Kids in Hong Kong start piano even at 2, but I think 4 is okay. I’d only do it, if I felt that my child is showing interest – Benji is already VERY interested in violin – and he is not too tired after school. Which i don’t think he should be. In this sense, my views are evolving with my child. 10 is okay but if your kids has a talent for something, you might have missed an important window if you start in the teens. Something like ballet is almost impossible to catch up later.
One category of students I did miss out was people like you who did enjoy school. Having seen other school systems at work here though and having interacted with people from different countries who went through different systems, my sense is that our traditional schooling had/has room for a lot of improvement. Some of us may have enjoyed school but my sense is that, on the whole, there is a whole lot more we could have learnt, in more interesting and inclusive ways. And we have the ability to give our kids that opportunity, we should.
I so love this post. In fact I admire that you have been able to coherently list down in one place all the opposing thoughts in your head.
I did my schooling in ICSE board. Studies were tough. I excelled at languages and humanities, sucked at science and math. The rote method was annoying because it seemed simply a matter of learning by-heart and spitting it out. Fortunately I had a grandfather who encouraged me to do reading outside my school-books, ask questions and generally keep myself well-informed. It helped.
The skill to learn knowledge from books, is entirely different from the knowledge to adapt and survive in the world. Which is why we see a lot of A+ students failing miserably when it comes to learning on-the-job (and some of them move on to be researchers, Ph.D, lecturers etc.) and some of the average or not-so-average students go on to succeed as entrepreneurs or business-men/women.
And after my graduation from Delhi, I went on to do my M.A. from London. The initial two months were terrible since it was an entirely new way of learning… reference to text books, drawing your own conclusions. There was no spoon-feeding any more. But gradually once I got the hang of it, I began to enjoy it.
There was no chance of copy pasting. You had to learn, irrespective of whether you wanted to or not. You explored more by your own, chose your own niche topics, and came to your own analysis. I feel this is what is sorely missing in Indian education today.
But like you said, some of the schools are starting to come out of this and trying to do something different. Choosing a school for your kid is a very important decision. Simply by saying we did not turn out so bad after all is choosing the simplistic route. The world is also tougher today, far tougher than it was on kids during our childhood. What worked for you may not work for your child and vice versa.
Part of my motivation in posting is voicing some of the things in my head and getting some clarity in so doing. Hence the past couple of them have been lengthy. There are always opposing thoughts in my head, something that drives the husband mad.
Yeah, as I said to LLT above, ICSE seemed rote-based too, though maybe better quality textbooks than we had in SSC, “The skill to learn knowledge from books, is entirely different from the knowledge to adapt and survive in the world.” Ideally, a school should equip students with both. Clearly, the system focuses only on the former.
Doing a BA in Arts in Xaviers, there might have been some spoonfeeding but it was a lot of independent research, projects etc. I think in junior college, they sort of eased us into it knowing that students were coming from a completely rote-based system. A similar thing happens in university in Hong Kong because the local school system is rote-based too. To some extent, we found it liberating and easier than mugging. But I know that not all colleges do this and even at the BA level, friends in other colleges were just memorising “answers” to questions on plays and poems.
“The world is also tougher today, far tougher than it was on kids during our childhood.” Is it? I hear this a lot but the more I think about it, it rings false. Some of us had to walk miles to school, many of us had to dodge flying pieces of chalk, dusters and slaps from teachers, the toilets in most schools were yuck. Our kids hopefully won’t have to deal with any of this. Even the traditional schools have improved in this regard, I hear. And we have the option of choosing different kinds of education styles. Once they finish school, there are many more career avenues open to kids than there were at our time. So many industries that didn’t exist in India, now do, leave alone the rest of the world. So why do you feel the world is tougher now?
Peer pressure on steroids, expectations of everyone on overall success in life (despite us all saying ‘just be happy’!) being higher, the options open up choices…work for kids who are focused, for those who are average and not specifically hooked into any one option, this is pretty stressful. Travel, distances, home work as things go higher up in addition to the distance….having to augment learning even in good schools, a lot of extra help from parents/tutors…I think our kids have it tougher for sure.
They might not mind the flying duster so long as it stays in school! Toilets have improved. That is one way we did have it tougher. No question there!
I take your point on peer pressure and expectations for success, but overall, I still feel we had it better than our parents and our kids have it better than us. Options can be confusing but they are better than having none. I think our kids have more opportunity to drop off the beaten track and still do okay, compared to us or our parents. Our kids have a safety net in us and basically social capital that insulates them.
In general, I am not with those who say modern life is harder and hark back to some simpler times.
Hehe I cannot help bringing up the toilets. Clearly I’m still traumatised!
We were faced with a similar dilemma a few months ago. In Bangalore – there are the international schools with the international boards, there are a couple of CBSE schools which are considered academically very good and almost impossible to get into, there are the old schools which are again very difficult to get into, the new schools which are relatively easier to get admission – basically for some it’s just a matter of if you can pay the fees.
I confess to being quite old fashioned about schooling. I’ve attended around 6-7 schools, mostly convents and of varying standards. I used to love school but that could be due to the fact that I was an almost ideal student – very good memory, sincere, outgoing, polite etc etc – so I was mostly the darling of most teachers.
I want the same for Anna. A middle class school, ICSE board (no reason but that’s just my preference), focus on academics, a few extras but not looking for anything fancy. I know that maybe I should analyse it more and maybe it’s wrong but I have such a deep-rooted belief in the importance of being academically excellent that I find it difficult to give too much weightage to other factors. I know the Indian system might not be the best but in a country like India I am not willing to take any other risk.
It may be due to the career paths of both me and my husband – toppers in school, qualified in the IIT-JEE exam and went on to ‘top’ engineering colleges, corporate jobs which we sometimes hate but pay a lot and basically we don’t know what else to do. I know it sounds pathetic sometimes but the truth is that both of us are quite happy with our lives and I don’t really see how it is possible to be happier or to be happy all the time. So it’s what I want for Anna, banking on the chances of her being good at studies. If she’s not, we’ll have to re-consider and we thankfully have a lot more options than our parents did.
Luckily she got into one of the schools I really liked – but only after an interview involving questions like, what’s your name, sing a rhyme, identify animals from pictures, identify shapes/colours – all of which she answered because she was thankfully in a good mood. This kindergarten feeds into a a primary school as well so if all goes well hopefully we’re done with the school search.
I’m not very sure about the education system in India – I’m assuming from the things I’ve heard here and there and also observing many upper-middle class parents moving to other systems that the field is much more open now than when we were growing up. I did a very cursory Google of some reputed higher education institutes in India and found they accept the IB, for example. Also, it seems now students have to take a separate entrance test even fields like medicine and engineering, even for the non IIT institutions. So the board that they passed out from becomes even less relevant. But the risks of veering away from the traditional system do nag me, as my question to Haathi above might indicate. My worry is that a child who is used to exploring and solving things by thinking about them will find it hard to mechanically churn out answers like one is expected to in the Indian public exams. Then again, putting a child through 10 years or more of an exam-oriented system only to train them for the possibility of a competitive exam they may or may not need seems a bit terrible. Neverthless, I understand your concern.
I went through the traditional system fairly seamlessly also. But maybe because I was often seated next to students who struggled, I felt the negative side of it keenly. Also, while I was one of those who always topped the exams and didn’t find it a big struggle to study, and in that sense an ideal student, I had a rebellious streak. I questioned everything from the time I was a kid. I never broke any rules, I was too nice for that. But I questioned the system (both academic and disciplinary) and found it wanting and my teachers probably sensed my contempt. Unfortunately for them, I aced their tests. Heh.
I guess, as you said, if your child is doing okay in the traditional system, why not? There are many factors to take into consideration when choosing school, not least of which is gaining admittance in the first place, so a wait and watch approach might be fine.
I do sense that there is a lot of potential wasted in the traditional system though, and while you and I might have landed up on a path that suits us, we need to look at the numbers. Were we just the lucky ones?
But a kindergarten that feeds into a primary school, that’s great! Yay for Anna and you.