But for me it’s also abstract—my Sasha’s only just over a year old, so my encounter with this nightmare is at least, what, six months off? Right now we’re just trying to manage Sasha’s transition from full-time nanny care to full-time outside-the-home day care. I’ll let you know how that goes next month, when it begins.
But in the meantime, I will imagine the future. And when I look into my crystal ball, I see… neither public nor private school. That is, neither one in this country.
See, I’ve got an out: in-laws in Taipei who would be only too glad to have us move back in with them. Honestly, from a convenience point of view, this would be awesome. My wife’s parents are doctors, we’d pay no rent, we’d have a cook, and—oh, yeah—the elementary school that Sasha would go to is just behind their house. Going there is a family tradition, too. Jean, her mother, and even her grandmother all went there. I’m not big on tradition, but even that seems pretty cool.
Would going to school in Taiwan be a good thing? To my mind, yes. Of course, I like it that Sasha would get a good grounding in Chinese, and that she’d get the good-Asian-student discipline instilled in her from the beginning. Apparently, there’s no janitor, so the kids are responsible for cleaning the classrooms, the toilets, the blackboards. As the lazy-ass child of a liberal education system, I naturally think that’s pretty cool.
There are, however, friends of Jean’s who say Taiwanese schools are bad. They limit creativity, teach kids pure rote learning, and produce automatons. But it’s not like we’ll keep Sasha in these schools forever, and Jean herself turned out fine, so I’m not worried.
The alternative, I guess, is that we enroll Sasha in that very same liberal education system I grew up in—in Amherst, Massachusetts. Yeah, we could move there, though I don’t know what kind of work we’d do, or whether the Kafkaesque process for applying to the Amherst Regional School system is any less frightening than New York’s.
Or: Is it all really so bad? I hear a lot of people fret about having to send their kids to Staten Island for preschool, but the horror stories are mostly about the application process, not the results. Or maybe we’ll get those next fall, when JP and Dalia start making new little friends in East New York.
I am facing this dilemma in reverse. My kids could go to quite adequate Swedish schools and get a free and excellent education – not to mention get drilled into their heads all these bad Swedish traits that I fear, like not wanting to stand out, etc.
And we want to move back to the states at some point to be near my family and to be in the sun. But how can we do that with schools? Can we really move to California, where the schools suck? And our lifestyle choices in Sweden mean we will never afford American private schools.
I figure I have three more years to figure it out …
It’s a similar thing in Taiwan, I think, and I definitely wouldn’t want my kid to go through the entire school system there. Still, there’s something to be said for grounding the kid with some educational discipline. But when do you evacuate them? Around, what, age 10 or so?