As I continue to explore what K-12 education in the US offers our children, I thought I would share my friend’s experience with elementary school education in the US and India as an illustrative example.
My friend and her husband, like many first generation immigrants in the last decade, came to the US as a result of a job-related relocation. Now, two children later, they have reached the mostly comfortable détente that most modern immigrants achieve between the lands and customs they left and their adopted homes and mores. However, like most immigrants, many members of their extended family including aging parents still live in another country.
Sometime last year, my friend, who lives in New Jersey, discovered that her mother was in the advanced stages of a terminal illness. My friend immediately packed her bags and hopped on a plane to India with her two children. During the first few weeks she was very busy reorienting herself back to life in India and organizing medical care and other things for her parents. As the weeks flew by, she realized that her son, a second grader, could not afford to miss school much longer. Her daughter, on the other hand, was only three, so being in school was not as much of a concern for her as it was for her brother.
At that point, it was very hard for her to predict the length of her stay in India. Being an only child, she also realized her father would need her support for a while once her mother passed on. So she decided to enroll her kids in an Indian school for the rest of the academic year.
Her son, a very bright child had been enrolled in a top ranked gifted program in New Jersey. However, considering that the standard curriculum in all Indian schools required students to learn three languages (English and 2 Indian languages) starting at Pre-K level, my friend realized her son would encounter considerable difficulties in catching up to his classmates. With everything else going on in her life, my friend really could not afford to spend the time to bring her son up to speed in two languages (one of which her son had hardly been exposed to). She looked for alternatives and enrolled him in an international school, where a number of children of foreign expatriates were also enrolled. This school did not require children to know a second or third language and offered French as a second language in third grade. Her son easily passed the entrance test in Math and English that was required for admission.
After a few months my friend was surprised to observe that the general standard of education in the regular classes at the international school was comparable to what her son had encountered in the gifted program in New Jersey. The “extra” academic inputs being offered to her son in the gifted program in New Jersey were part of the standard curriculum for all students in this international school in India. Her son fortunately is doing very well in India and my friend intends to let him complete the academic year at this school.
But this experience has had a big impact on my friend. She now wonders whether they should relocate back to India so that her children would have access to a better quality of education. I would like to point out that her experience is not unusual. I know many people who have relocated back to India or Singapore or other Asian countries in the recent past primarily because they believed that their children would get a better education.
So, what constitutes a good quality education? How do we know that our kids are getting a good education? What are our bases for comparison? These I hope to talk about further in my next post.
Enakshi Choudhuri
What constitutes a “good quality education” is a captivating philosophical question, but the answer is in the eye of the beholder. Number of foreign languages taught, method of foreign language instruction and the ages at which children learn to read and perform mathematical calculations can be measured. But education also consists of intangibles that don’t conform easily into metrics.
Further, when children relocate from one curriculum to another, cultural factors play a significant role. Teaching methods that work well in one country may be ineffective when incompatible with the norms and expectations of the cultural climate.
There is no doubt that it is common in many Asian and European countries to teach children math facts and foreign languages at an earlier age than is the case in the United States. And children may learn greater discipline when it comes to sitting down to do homework or practice music, both at an early age, continuing into adulthood. Nevertheless, the American system of education teaches initiative, problem solving skills and a “can-do” attitude in a way that is unique among these cultures. Children raised in America have the skills to learn independently, work collaboratively and think creatively in a different sort of way than Indian, Japanese, Chinese or British children do.
Schools are a microcosm of the cultures in which they exist. Good education in one country may not mirror that of another. But children raised in more than one country can learn the best of each system. And they can also be prepared to live in the global world they will undoubtedly encounter as adults.