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.
We are two months away from our child sitting the selective schools test and I feel increasingly resentful about the selective system. It is undoubtedly leading to a two-tier state education system (or three-tier education system if you count the private schools.) Have you read ‘The Stupid Country’?
we could afford to send our boys to those exclusive schools, if we decided it was worth while
Yes. Us too. We could, if we wanted to, find the money to send our three girls to one of the nearby private schools. But there is an excellent state school just down the road, and I really can’t see the marginal benefit in going elsewhere.
But more importantly than that, I believe in state education, for all sorts of egalitarian reasons, and for reasons of excellence for everyone, not just those who go to private schools (if indeed what they get is “excellence”). Very roughly, I’ve got no problem if parents want to spend their own money and send their children to private schools, but for reasons of egalitarianism and excellence for everyone, I see no reason to use taxpayers’ money to fund that choice. I must get around to writing about this sometime…
We’re still several years away from having to make this choice when it comes to the Bee, but I find it hard to imagine that we will, in the end, send her to private school. The public high school in our town is about average for our metropolitan area, and to get into an elite private high school, we would not only have to pay some ridiculous amount of money, we would also have to deal with the fact that the closest one is four towns away.
Unless something terribly drastic happens in the next four years in our public high school here, I’m guessing that she’ll be attending that school.
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?
Dudelet is six and I know of at least one of his class mates being threatened with coaching. I’m very torn about it. On the one hand, I want him to have an element of choice about what he does. On the other, the freedom of choice I have as an adult is not unrelated to the amount of enforced education I had as a child.
Thanks for the comments. 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.
> 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.
This is bit of a nature vs nurture question. Is the coaching pushing the child ahead and expanding their abilities (as exercise might do physically)? As with exercise, pushing too hard might have side effects, but these are experiments we let parents perform on their children. “Nurture” people will be more inclined to do this. Children who respond well to this would be perfect for a selective school.
Or is the coaching just making a less gifted child look temporarily more advanced? “Nature” people would think this. The child then gets into the selective school, but is already running at or over capacity and spends a few miserable years running behind everyone and coached to the eyeballs.
Will the coached child be too slow to make full use of the teaching staff? Or even fail to enrich the other students with their intelligent contributions? Or are good teachers and a competitive environment just the thing they need? Will someone who is already so focused and serious (and well-supported at home) be a benefit to the school, or will they refuse to study anything not on the exam?
In order to figure out whether coaching is bad or not, you really need to understand what the benefit of a selective school is. Is it better staff, smarter fellow students, an environment that values learning? Once you know that, it’ll be easier to figure whether it’s worth sending your child to one. Or even coaching them in.
Perhaps all the coaching schools are just a signal that we need more selective schools. And perhaps a child who can be coached into one belongs there.
[…] 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 […]
An academic tells me that the formerly-coached students are obvious in his tutorials – they don’t pay attention and can’t easily do the work in classtime. They rely on being able to go off and do the work in a group with other students who have also been coached, because this is what they did in high school. He said that there is research which shows that coached kids don’t pay attention in school as it’s not the important place for them.
I faced the coaching dilemma for three or so years as my two duaghters progressed from primary to secondary in one of the few UK boroughs that has selective schools. I am about to move to Melbourne and now have the added consideration of a plethora of private schools.
We did provide our daughters with some coaching, but on how to work through the 11 plus selection tests and handle the trauma of the test environment as this was hardly covered in their government primary. We felt the coaching was only fair because it gave them at least some of the skills that are nurtured in the privately educated prep school pupils who are drilled and drilled for years on selection tests.
The outcome was that daugher number one passed the 11 plus and is doing very well in the selective school academic environment. But she reports that many of her well drilled prep school peers are struggling to maintain the required standard.
Daughter number two didn’t pass the 11 plus and is in Year 7 of the best of the local state schools. It is early days but she is happy with an academic level that seems just right for her. If she had attended a private prep school then it is likely she would have passed the 11 plus, but would she now be one of the stugglers in that environment?
I am an Indian student that is currently at a comprehensive high school. Next year I am moving to a selective school- I never really got a chance to do the Year 6 Selective Test as I had just moved from the UK. I reckon my parents and I are also guilty, despite being of a different ethic background, of stereotyping most Asians (mainly Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Sri Lankan etc, not so much North Indian but more South) of spending a lot of their time coaching. And I don’t personally think coaching is a bad thing if it’s something to you do to either a)catch up on a subject you have trouble with, or b) use it as an ‘extension work’ opportunity because you are so ahead (naturally!) at your comprehensive school and you get bored. I think I fit part B- don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to boast by making myself seem ultra intelligent or anything (in fact smartness is definitely not the priority in my life!) and so yes, I do coaching, just for 2 hours a week, to improve my skills in maths, which is something that I am genuinely interested in and want to improve. I think coaching is an issue when people use it as a preparation for selective schools, because it shouldn’t be used. Selective schools are for children who are naturally ‘gifted and talented’ (academically) and coaching often means that hard-working students (And yes this is a skill to admire!) are trained to get in. Of course, if they are willing to work hard enough to get in, that’s great, but at the same time that just completely defeats the purpose of a selective school. A selective school would be appropriate for someone like me who is bored in class because they got the concept in 5 minutes while everyone else spends the rest of the period confused (naturally!), not someone who has learnt it beforehand for the purpose of getting better marks! Hard work is completely the right way to go, and I really admire those that study seriously (probably because I never do it myself lol) BUT selective school entry should not be based on hard work. It should be based on intelligence, and that intelligence should be nurtured through hard work at that selective school just as it is at a comprehensive school.
I do well at school, and Mum always glares at me because I try to study for tests last minute, I’m involved in about 8 different extracurriculars and sport (the only day after school that I have free is Friday!) and part of that includes 9 hours in dance classes per week. However, I still manage to get great marks which really surprises people! Yes, I get the same result as another girl who spends 8 hours a week on tutoring, but there’s the difference in values and priorities. There’s the difference between smart work and hard work- and “selective school smart” and “hard work smart”- one is natural and one is not. Any level of intelligence is of course useless if you don’t work hard, so don’t get me wrong I think that’s really important! Just not for the entry itself- leave selective schools for those who can naturally cope.
As a bogan underachieving Asian, I still have more in common with you in terms of attitudes towards education than my neighbours. The problem is cultural. Legacy of snobbery and the class system of the mother country. I’m considering moving to a better school zone so my kid doesn’t get bashed and bullied. He’s smart. Is it because he’s Asian ?scientists are scanning brains to search for the gene of giftedness but what I think they should look at is the exceedingly low standards in Australia. Kids are capable of a lot in the primary Years but hey why
bother studying when u can dig dirt for more money. There’s definitely been social engineering by conservative policies. All my public schools here aim low.
Kids ar