"The Secret Life of Them" - Selective entry, migrant familes & academic pressure

[slothpomba]

The monthly is a quite good magazine (i dont know what else to call it). They usually post rather long form articles and mostly they're pretty good. I found this one fascinating and given the nature of the community here, i thought i would share it. The writer interviews the daughter of migrant parents from China. She talks about academic pressure to do well, "coaching colleges" and accelerated learning programs.

I think unlike some articles about this it is quite balanced. It doesn't extoll some trumped up virtues of a lifestyle, parenting mode or coaching college. At the same time, it doesn't totally put it down as invalid or not a proper way to look at it. Through the lens of an interview with a young person going through this all, i think we wind up with a rather raw and balanced account of the whole thing.

Here is the link to the article.


A few teaser bits:

Each SEAL school is responsible for determining its own selection criteria, which means students are not siphoned off by a single test. The inclusion of interviews and Year 6 reports means that the SEAL program takes a broader approach to determining which students to admit. Their personalities and characters matter. Melgaard notes that SEAL students feel a level of acceptance here that might be absent if they’d remained in ordinary classes: “They would be the one or two kids who would stand out and be picked on. But here, they have their Doctor Who club and their chess club, and they bring textbooks to school camps. There is a strong culture of pride in doing well.”

Even private schools are beginning to acknowledge that a coached student may not necessarily have the type of rounded, inquisitive mind they are after. Sydney Grammar School, for instance, strongly discourages academic coaching as preparation for its scholarship exam. If the purpose behind education for the gifted is to ensure that the brightest students are sufficiently challenged, then this idea of extra, relentless tutoring cranks the dial all the way back around to the beginning, where naturally curious intellects are no longer being challenged in the ways that matter, and students’ skills are limited to test-taking and thinking within the rules.

Indeed, when Julia Gillard declared that the Asian Century begins in the classroom, coaching colleges were hardly what she meant. Amy Chua’s controversial book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, raised an unsettling question about education: is giftedness inherent, or is it all about the hard slog? Asian cities such as Shanghai may top OECD charts for educational attainment, but many teachers in Australia are sceptical about whether the rigid, rote-learning techniques used there will create the sort of adaptive and flexible future workers and leaders needed in the decades ahead.

[Shenz0r]

My parents made me begin preparing for the MHS exam in like Year 6, so two years before the exam. I went to a coaching college and admittedly, without it I probably wouldn't have got in. From my experience the way the author describes how they msrket to parents is pretty accurate. Instead of focusing on broad, critical thinking, there's huge emphasis on studying to the exam.

[brenden]

My parents made me begin preparing for the MHS exam in like Year 6, so two years before the exam. I went to a coaching college and admittedly, without it I probably wouldn't have got in. From my experience the way the author describes how they msrket to parents is pretty accurate. Instead of focusing on broad, critical thinking, there's huge emphasis on studying to the exam.

Do you resent this at all? It seems so, so strange to me.

[Shenz0r]

From a purely utilitarian perspective, not really. Initially, I only did a few practise tests every now and then to gauge my skills, they thought I had a so-so chance of getting in but they also said I didn't need to begin doing intensive work that early. However, my parents still continued to send me to weekend maths and english classes, which I had been going to since prep. Coursework from the coaching college only started getting intensive in Year 8 a few months before the exam but I thought of it as no pain, no gain for a temporary time, and I also put in some independent study to get ahead of my tutor class.

I think that the coaching college was worth it because I wouldn't have gotten into MHS without it, and MHS was worth every single early morning train. The colleges are most valuable to students who would just miss out on a spot otherwise; I was smart compared to people in my piss-poor school, but going to the college made me realise my habits of making assumptions in questions, poor exam techniques etc. Many of their practise exam questions were similar to the actual exam iirc, and even with my improvements before the exam, I still only managed to nick into MHS (I had one superior only and pretty much got in because I went to a less competitive, shitty school), so if I didn't go to the college I'd probably have to languish at my old school, which I wanted to avoid and private schools were out of the question.

As for the weekend schooling I always had, they would just clog up the morning of my weekends so there was still plenty of free time. And I was never really stressed.