澳洲洋人母亲的BLOG

在澳大利亚小学教育



昨天晚上看到一个澳洲妈妈写的BLOG，她是两个马上要读High School年纪的男孩母亲，估计是住在悉尼某ICSEA很高的地区。

在她今年一月份的一篇BLOG里，有一篇是说替她孩子择校的，里面提到了精英中学和补习班，大段英文，大家有兴趣可以看看一个澳洲白人母亲是如何来看待这些事情的。

Coaching our school students

As Chatterboy gets closer to high school, our conversations and angst about high school seem to intensify. I’ve blogged about this before – the choices we have for our boys are:

two very exclusive private boys schools within walking distance
a selective boys school within a long (2km) walking distance
a very exclusive coed school that is a short bus ride away
a comprehensive coed school a longer bus ride (probably 40 minutes door to door on a public bus) away that is locally notorious for being the place children get sent when they get tossed out of the exclusive private schools (which happens to be Mr Penguin’s alma mater – he doesn’t think it is as bad as painted, but it wasn’t great)
Of course, this means that we are incredibly fortunate. Although we don’t want to, we could afford to send our boys to those exclusive schools, if we decided it was worth while.

When we have this discussion with other parents, sooner or later the conversation gets to the selective schools and the dreaded ‘coaching’. The stereotypical view of selective schools in Sydney these days is that only “Asian” students get into them, by spending every waking moment being coached – perhaps here or here.

Lisa Pryor, in The Pin Striped Prison summed up the conversation well:

To families with children at elite private schools, all this tutoring is considered somewhat distasteful. ‘Asians’, they whisper and point discreetly. Filling up the selective schools with their hardworking ways, cheating with tutoring! Don’t these Asians have any respect for the fact that the only student who is supposed to have an advantage in the race for gifted and talented classes and selective schools is the white child whose parents speak fluent English, work in professional jobs and live in houses crammed with books? Private schools like to teach their children to be workaholics in other ways. Well-rounded ways. By rising at six in the morning for swimming squad, spending the lunch hour rehearsing with the madrigal group, taking speech and drama classes after school.

I think that there is some degree of truth to the stereotype – there are a lot of “Asian” students at our local selective high schools. I see students from all the local private exclusive and selective schools on my way to work in the morning, and the difference in the faces between the schools is quite stark. Those “Asians” have all sorts of backgrounds – from first generation immigrants to children whose families have been in Australia for generations. But they generally value education fairly highly – highly enough so that they travel from all over Sydney to get a selective school education, and, rumour has it, have a lot of educational coaching after school, in primary and secondary school.

But as Lisa Pryor asks, what exactly is wrong with being coached? If a child is good at sport, it is perfectly socially acceptable for them to spend (by the end of primary school) six hours doing it. The academic coaching that I linked to above seems to vary. One seems to be of the order of one or two afternoons a week. Another seems to make it possible to spend every afternoon studying, plus Saturday mornings.

As Pryor points out above, the upper middle class parents (like us) who say that they want their children to spend their time being children, rather than studying, don’t necessarily give them all that extra time as unstructured time. They get them to do other things, like drama (the boys are spending this week of the school holidays at a theatre course). They spend a lot of time reading books, and going to museums (we went to the Maritime museum last weekend, to learn about mythic creatures). Of course they watch TV, but many of the things we do as a family are also quite educational in a broad sense. So we aren’t exactly coaching our children, but we are educating them outside school as well as in it.

One of the pieces of research that Malcolm Gladwell spends a lot of time on in his book Outliers is the fact that by an enormous margin, the best predictor of someone’s success in a given field is the amount of time they have spent practising it. He calls it the 10,000 hour rule (blogged by a reviewer here), and it is based on research by Ericsson and Charness, among others. So if children have spent a substantially greater time studying, they are likely to be better, objectively, at pretty much any test a school is going to give them. If all they’ve been studying is a particular kind of test, then that’s all they are good at. So those coached children really do belong in a selective school. They’re better at school, and selective schools are supposed to be for children who are better at school. They are likely to be better at school than children who haven’t spent a lot of their non school time studying.

Today’s Australian society does value education more than pretty much any society in history. Knowledge workers are those who have the highest potential incomes. So education is important. It seems, though, that we have reached a very unhealthy form of apartheid in the way in which many parents react to that. Some shell out ridiculous amounts of money to exclusive private schools (which also get far too much funding from the federal government). Others have their children coached throughout school - here or here. And the children of parents who don’t do either of those things are more and more likely to fall behind in educational outcomes.

Education is too important to be left entirely up to the market. And so, here in Australia, it isn’t. Everyone is entitled to a public education. But increasingly, that public education is more and more inferior to the private, or private supplemented, alternatives. And that can’t be a good thing for our society, particularly if we have any expectation of equality of opportunity for our children.

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她文章里提到的Lisa Pryor，是SMH的专栏作家，上楼斜体的部分出自于Lisa Pryor的书
The Pinstriped Prison
How overachievers get trapped in corporate jobs they hate

Lisa Pryor曾经在HSC里满分，然后她进入大学主修法律，毕业后做了律师和投资银行家，但是最后她在收入少的多的报社里做了记者。

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文章还里提到一个人Malcolm Gladwell，出生在英国，加拿大读的书，现在是美国The New Yorker杂志的作家。
他写了一本书叫做Outliers，里面的内容被这个洋人妈妈引用，很有趣。
说，如果要预测一个人在某个领域的成功，其实取决于这个人在这个领域里花了多少时间练习。
Malcolm Gladwell称之为“一万小时”规则，当然他宣称是有科学根据的。

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upper middle class的家长当然是有很多选择面的了

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很有意思, 还是比较开明讲理的人.老朱有她BLOG的 link 吗?

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http://penguinunearthed.wordpress.com/
你肯定会感兴趣的，
这个妈妈是个书虫，里面有大量的book review。

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老朱的业余时间肯定都花在研究教育上了, 看的东西真广!

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they want their children to spend their time being children！

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这个妈妈听起来是个典型的‘主流’白人家长，本身受教育程度良好，在大咨询公司做team leader，家在北区，言语中有那么点点傲慢，有那么点点不甘，思路逻辑性很强，是'fairness'的忠实拥护者。精英中学里的‘Asian'很可能成为她儿子以后的peers，所以她也很关心。

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某私校校长曾说, 某精英中学根本没有通过学校教育给学生增值，因为本身他们收录的就是顶尖的生源，所以也能给出顶尖的成绩。

当然，校长的意思是说，他们学校是可以给学生增值，具体怎么增先不去推敲，有一点我是认同的，所谓精英中学基本上就是一群小书呆子聚在一起玩玩数理化的游戏，学校本身的师资或设备也未见得高于其他普通中学。所以也不存在咱霸占谁的资源的说法。搞不懂为啥洋人家长这么义愤填膺。

同理，如果一个洋人的孩子天天练足球，最后进了某个俱乐部，我们不会咬牙切齿，觉得人家就是通过coaching 而获得了什么特殊待遇

Malcolm Gladwell 的理论我赞同，MS 我们那个补习学校的校长也赞同。

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其实是不是这样说也是相对的。比如说国内的重点中学，确实靠特权聚集了方圆多少里的最尖子生，但同时也为这些学生提供了一个尖子生的氛围——周围的人基本没一个比你笨的。

对于有些孩子来说，这个就是最重要的，做HR的特别是科研院所HR的可能会知道，有一种人就是不能容忍身边一起工作的人里面有一个白痴。

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我们也该听听White孩子的父母的观点，对孩子的教育不要太看重学业。补课占用了孩子太多的时间，算算你的孩子用了多少时间在做题，看电视，运动，看书和自由活动？
华人的孩子真是太少有时间做“real kids”了。

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西人有西人的方式，华人有华人的做法
就怕什么？就怕学别人的做法没学会，最后搞的一塌糊涂～
只要合理规划加上这边学习没那么紧张，小孩仍然有足够的时间玩

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恩，这个好像说我。华人的应试教育偶强烈反对，而西人的方式偶不了解，孩子就处于教育真空带...........反思啊反思

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这位洋人母亲想表达什么观念？
是想说最好没有精英学校、私立学校，全部都是公校，且教育质量完全相等，这样就不用烦恼选学校了？

[ 本帖最后由 西边雨 于 2010-3-2 16:38 编辑 ]

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"所谓精英中学基本上就是一群小书呆子聚在一起玩玩数理化的游戏"
关于这点我和D妈妈唱点反调。我觉不能把学习好和书呆子划等号。学习好的孩子，属于悟性比较高的，学习好其他方面也不会差。所谓智商情商都不错。可能有学呆了的孩子，但我接触的大部分学习好的孩子，都是聪明活泼，能力很强的。

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太好了，大家讨论热烈

要了解洋人的想法就要多看他们的文章，呵呵。
我们不需要因为自己是华人就要和洋人对立起来，开放的态度总是没错的。

我想让大家了解其实洋人里对于孩子教育的重视程度不亚于我们华人，只是我们很少去关心。

再贴两篇这个妈妈对于My School的看法。

还是大段英文

[ 本帖最后由 patrickzhu 于 2010-3-2 16:57 编辑 ]

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Well, give me some statistics about something I care about, and I can’t help myself. I’ve just spent an enjoyable hour and a half getting statistics about all our local primary schools, plus the high schools we’re thinking of sending Chatterboy and Hungry Boy to.*

Robert at Larvatus Prodeo points out some of the problems the site has if you happen to be compared with a selective school – the demographics of the parents of a selective school probably aren’t as important to the NAPLAN results as the fact that all the students have passed an exam to get in. I’d add to that a problem here in NSW – OC classes for year 5 make some schools (eg my old school) look very strange. If you double the size of a year cohort, by adding  a group of students who are all in the top 5% of the state, you’ll appear to do a fantastic job of teaching your year 5 students! Not surprisingly, the school is suddenly substantially better than every single one of its statistically similar schools for Year 5.

The Grattan Institute (via LP) has a report pointing out that there are better ways to measure students than a crude correction for demographics – value add (looking at the change in students’ individual scores from year to year) is a much better way of measuring school performance, and has the advantage of being more comparative across demographic starting points (although then you run into the problem of which school gets the credit, given the tests are done fairly early in the school year).

Helen, who hasn’t managed to get on to the site, laments the continuing commodification of our schools.

For myself, I’m mostly too busy wallowing in statistics to draw any conclusions. But I’d really like to know what we parents are expected to do with the information. Julia Gillard said:

And what people will see is they’ll probably see some areas where their child’s school is going well or better than similar schools or as well as or better than the national average. They might see some areas where their school is falling that bit behind and they’ll want to go and have a conversation at the school about what they can do to lift that performance.

But when people have chosen a school, I think what they will do is they will look at My School and if there’s an area that they think their school needs to lift in then they will be there talking to the teachers, talking to the principal, working in partnerships with school to lift those standards.

There is a limit to how much control parents have over the children’s education. There are generally lots of reasons why people live where they do, and enormous costs (social, as well as economic) to moving house, or moving their children to a school further away. And there is also a limit to the influence any parent, no matter how involved, can have over the performance of their local school. Most teachers, quite reasonably, will resent parents telling them how they can teach their little darlings better.

But the government has had access to this information for quite some time. And what have they done with it? They have funded schools strictly on a formula which nobody, even the beneficiary schools, believe has any semblance of fairness. If they really believed that this information was useful in improving school performance, then they would already be using it to try and improve the performance of all those schools which have a below average performance. But I can’t see any evidence of that in this government’s “education revolution”. Instead, every school in the country, regardless of how good their facilities already are, has a building program. And I’ve not seen any evidence in any educational policy announcement of the struggling schools getting any extra help or resources to lift them to the level of the most successful schools.

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* Actually the most interesting part of the site, for me, was the socio-economic scores themselves. Some surprises there in which schools had the highest scores around where we live. I suspect that some of the counter-intuitive results (Mosman not being the highest, for example) came from the proportion of Mosman parents who send their children to private schools even in primary school.

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The SMH has published a league table of all schools in NSW, derived from the myschool site, ranking them by their Year 5 and Year 9 average results. They’ve called it an “alphabetized list” (because league tables are illegal), which is rubbish, because each school has a ranking (calculated on the average year 5 and year 9 results).

There are all sorts of problems with the ranking (it ignores year 3 and year 7, it doesn’t show the raw material the school started with, which is why the selective schools dominate the list, just to name two), but the bigger problem, for me, is the intrinsic assumption made both by the website that it is OK for children from low socio economic groups to get worse results. The Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) is used to decide which schools are ranked against which. So the thinking behind the MySchool website is that it is perfectly fine for children from a school like John Warby Public School to be significantly worse than the state average, because if we compare their results with similar poor children, they mostly do a lot better. I’m sure that means that the effort the teachers, parents and children of that school make is well directed. But imagine what more they could do for their children if they had the resources of this school.

It’s not acceptable that this site implies that John Warby Public School students are getting a good outcome from our school system. That implies that it is fine for children from poor backgrounds to get a worse education than average. This information should be being used to take resources away from the schools which are beating the state’s unadjusted average, particularly if they are private schools, and give more resources to schools that have a NAPLAN average below the average.

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这样的“反调”，我想多多地听

现在外界似乎已经有set mind, 觉得精英里的亚裔 = nerdy.

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这个世界上那里有这么多书呆子啊。
我倒是觉得什么科学家，教育学家，语言学家，还有什么围棋专业九段，国际象棋世界冠军这些人里nerdy的很多很多。:)
一般意义上的专业人士都是很实际灵活的人。

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有个人在这个妈妈的BLOG上留言，提到了墨尔本的Glen Waverley High对亚裔家长的吸引力。
也提到了D妈妈所说，到底是学校给了学生优秀的教育，还是优秀的学生给了学校好的名声。
Coaching is pretty common among Asian students. However, it needs to be acknowledged that the cultural drive in many Asian cultures to get a good education tends to be stronger than in mainstream Australian culture. Obviously “Asians” is a broad category and there is a lot of variation, but there is a high level of aspiration towards getting a a degree and a traditionally accepted “good job”. I think the traditionally more egalitarian Australian society has numbed this aspiration somewhat among Anglo-Australians.

Here in Melbourne, our main selective schools (Melbourne High and MacRobertson) are increasingly dominated by East Asian and South Asian students. As is Glen Waverley High, which is arguably the best non-selective state school.

Glen Waverley High is interesting because it is a magnet for Asian families, who are desperately buying into the area so their kids are eligible to attend the school and get private-school-marks for public-school-cost.

But I wonder, is it really the school itself that is producing the high marks in its students? Or is it the high numbers of Chinese, Malaysian, Indian and Sri Lankan students (with tutors, driven parents and strong work ethics for study) that are giving the school the results?

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这段是她对别人的回应

On balance, what I think I would like for my boys is a high school like their current primary school. Public, comprehensive, close by, with great teachers and an involved community. But it doesn’t exist, around here. So I agree with you Deborah, I would much prefer a public education (although our current state school is not enormously diverse, at least socioeconomically). But if our local comprehensive schools are starved of funds and students by the strong push from the population and both sides of government towards private schools, at some point, I’m going to put my boys’ education ahead of my political views.

Eurasian Sensation, I agree with all your points. And I agree that the results are often coming from a strong work ethic – which is mostly a good thing. Dadwhowrites makes a good point that a good education (even a fairly forcefed one) creates much more choice as an adult. And I strongly value education, for its own sake, as well as the choices it creates. So I’m trying to work out why I still react so badly to the thought of coaching, for children who might be my boys’ peers.

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我觉得补习很好啊，不然那么多业余时间不知道怎么打发，多无聊啊。
  至少在我当学生的时候那些什么什么班，我都主动去上的，不然时间多的不知道怎么打发。
其实就不能有人的兴趣爱好就是做作业吗......  好比我小时候就真的很爱做作业

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追寻不存在的东西不如在现实条件下做出相对正确的选择来的实际～

我倒对她提到的speech course感兴趣，不知道哪儿有

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看了后, 觉得其实她的观点跟前两天一个贴子里的提到的local家长没大区别, 就是说在政治观点上来说, 她支持公校, 但是现在就连她住的地方也没有她心目中理想的公校,而且其实她还是非常不欣赏亚洲人的coaching 文化, 所以逼得她可能不得不送孩子们去私校了. (I’m going to put my boys’ education ahead of my political views.)

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没错，我看了她前前后后上上下下的BLOG链接，就是这个意思了。
这个妈妈是个修养很高的人，喜欢读书，看事情都有自己的观点，不是人云亦云的那种。

不过她看世界很理想化，整天在想象着这个世界应该如何如何。和我这样的人基本上在两条平行线上:)
但是我挺欣赏她的，因为她的理想化里有很多很多理性中肯的东西，无论你赞同与否，她如果也来混我们论坛的话，肯定会有很多粉丝的，呵呵。

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一个比较典型的middle class 或up middle class 女小资, 女性主义, 澳洲共和派, 她的博还是挺好看的, 她的链接中的一些博也不错, 再次非常感谢老朱的分享.

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我还不是很了解这里大部分华人孩子到底在什么状况，因为我认识在这里的都同我自己差不多，我们的孩子参加的非学业的活动没有比洋人少。LOTUS1993就是我在国内时育儿网上认识的朋友，她前两天也说了，她的大孩子在SBH，有很多活动的。
国内上海，杭州等城市的孩子，也都是有很多活动的，特别是那些读书好的孩子，一般都是天资好的，更加有时间精力参加很多活动。
我觉得课业以外的活动的多寡同家长的SES密切相关的，中国现在富起来了，家长们也都有苦读的经历，学识，见识都未必比这里所谓的UPPERMIDDLECLASS差了，朱版转的这个洋妈妈对华人的了解还是片面了。不过，我倒很高兴，如果她们都这么想的话，等她们的孩子从私校毕业了，同我们的既会读书，又不NERDY的孩子竞争，我们不就有优势了吗？
澳洲中文论坛热点