“Criticisms of U.S. Schools/ schooling. In Haitian parents’ understanding, the goal of schooling is to instruct as well as to provide an education, the French word referring to providing children not only with reading, writing, and counting abilities, but also with moral guidance, a sense of civic duty, and interpersonal skills.” ((Re)Constructing Home and School: Immigrant Parents, Agency, and the (Un)Desirability of Bridging Multiple Worlds, Fabienne Doucet, p2722)
To some extent, Haitian parents are similar to traditional Chinese parents. In some aspects, they are both perceived as restrictive and closed-minded. They are strict to kids, want their kids to follow their instructions, and kids are less free. Although those are not exactly true and it varies among different families and in contexts, overall, it is quite true compared the States. So when I saw the heading “criticism of schooling”, I expected some thing, like parents are not satisfied with education quality, especially academically and was surprised that actually Haitian parents are not fulfilled not because of it, but because of teacher’s lack of moral guidance and civic duty. It makes me feel the values towards education are slightly different among too countries.
In China, people admire American education of encouraging creativity and higher quality. So an increasing number of parents send their kids to go abroad to study at a younger age in hoping to learn more advanced knowledge and be more competitive. But at the same time, they are worried their kids are “westernized” and become less Chinese. They want their kids to keep their original cultural values at the same time get better skills and be more open-minded. Just like Haitian parents want to keep their original culture and may send their kids back to Haiti to protect the origin. Chinese parents have the same concerns, but it is not severe enough to discourage them from keeping their kids in China instead of going abroad.
Although American education is always praised, but the poor math teaching is long criticized and made fun of among Chinese. Even Chinese immigrants, 1.5 generation or 2 generation is complaining that their kids are much behind than their peers in China in math. They complain the kids can learn nothing and teachers do not value math at all. It is so ironic for me since Chinese education is accused of being spoon-feed education, and many parents send their kids go abroad to get rid of it. But for the immigrants, they want their kids to learn what Chinese kids are learning in school. It is not rare in NYC for Asian Americans to get math tutor for their kids to get their kids more advantages. I think part of reason is that Asian Chinese is labeled as Minority Model and Chinese is long viewed as being good at math, so their parents do not their kids to be left behind.