February 23, 2017 - 21:08
I've been reflecting on my education history a lot recently, and the fact that I've been privileged enough to go to private schools my entire life. Although I was born in California and call that where I'm "from" (when people ask and I don't feel like giving a long-winded explanation), I grew up in China and have technically lived more years in China than in the US. English wasn't even my first language, it was Mandarin. Because we were technically expatriates in China, my brother and I attended one of the many international schools. It never felt like public vs. private school when I was young, even now. It was just the school that we all go to, because the other option was local Chinese schools where Mandarin was spoken and English was a foreign language. At my school, Chinese was a foreign language option to learn, which many of us took up through Elementary and Middle School. As I'm writing this right now, I'm remembering how uncomfortable I used to feel, because my family is Chinese and we lived in China, but we weren't Chinese, not in the real sense. Yet I didn't live in the US, nor did I have any memory of ever living there. Luckily, however, I had kids who shared this same strange feeling of foreignness that always leads to long explanations on where you're "from."
International School is a very interesting place. It's living in a country that you are labelled foreign in some way or another, going to a special type of school because the native language isn't English, yet feeling a sense of belonging and home. Third culture kids, it's a term for kids who are raised in a culture that's other to their parents'.
To top it off, my high school experience, which was in the US, still wasn't what most would call a "normal" education, since I went to a small boarding school in California which tuition cost about the same as my tuition here at Bryn Mawr College. My school consisted a halfway split between day students who lived in the area, and boarding students, whose origins ranged from all over the world. While the two schools differed signficantly, I recognize that one of the main similarities they do share is that they were very good private schools. And the more I realize my irregular education history, the more I realize how little I actually know about the education system, because I've had to experience little of it's bad sides.