Nice white parents and their expat schools
I’ve been thinking about and writing a lot more about schooling than I usually do recently. In part it’s the question on everyone’s mind - do I keep sending the kids to online school? Do we go back to classroom (presencíal) learning? What is the tipping point when the benefits of getting back to classroom outweigh risks of long term online schooling?
One of the issues for me is that I have one kid that is doing just fine in online learning and one who is hating it. As we’ve been on an expat placement I’ve been able to find a school that was just perfect for him in a day to day, face to face setting - small classes, lots of green spaces, soft learning style. So I’m eager to get him back into his school, but the local COVID restriction make it look like that might be an ask until next year.
I’m generally a pretty pro-public school parent, but in all honesty that is relatively easy in Australia (my home base). If you make an effort to live in an ethically diverse neighbourhood and get involved in the school community then the school community is pretty good. We didn’t live in the richest neighbourhood but the mix was overall pretty good and I always felt very confident with my kids attending a local public school.
In previous placements I tried the local school options, but honestly that is a pretty hard adjustment when you come out of a western school system. It’s a different beast, with limited teacher skills, at times confronting teacher discipline techniques and lack of training and resources. As a single family group in that system you cannot lift the boat and its hard to know if the life skills your children learn being in a local school (including being robbed or beaten up) could ever be worth it. We pulled them out rapidly. I still wonder if I should have done more to influence the schools we experienced but I wonder how I could as an outsider.
The nice white parents podcast has me wondering what I should really be doing as a ‘nice white’ aka rich and white parent in this environment. Should I be participating in local schools? Or letting them get resources without including my influence or opinion on what money should be spent on? Realistically how would I best be able to support the countries I live in to have the best possible public education system - is it as an outsider or as a participant (and what is the valued of my participation if the time I am there is limited by my placements duration?
Does anyone have any thoughts or smart ideas on how expats can help local public education where they live in an effective way?
