I send my daughter to a Mandarin-immersion school.My daughter goes to a Mandarin-immersion public school. This decision has caused many raised eyebrows in my mostly-Indian circle in the US, but most reactions have been intrigued and encouraging. My motivations were to get the best education at the cheapest price, and this is what made most sense for us. It’s been a rather interesting experience, with immersion not only in a new language, but a culture and a way of being. I find myself quite amazed that this is an option at all, and that this actually hasn’t been as scary as I imagined. Navigating the modern schoolscapeLike all Indian parents in the US, we too grew up prioritizing education, and aiming to give our children nothing but the best in that department. When it came to it, though, I had to wonder what ‘best’ meant. California seemed to be discouraging children from learning Algebra. Social media posts from teachers and parents in the aftermath of the Lowell High School controversy in San Francisco seemed to indicate that students of Asian backgrounds weren’t being encouraged like before, and sometimes were actively discouraged. Besides, how public schools approached topics of race, religion, social justice, and sexuality seemed a little too much to deal with. It seemed to be focused on telling kids what to think on these topics than on helping them observe and come to their own conclusions. My friends went around this by putting their children in demanding private school chains like Challenger and Stratford. I was particularly intrigued by the Harker school, where the teachers usually have advanced degrees and are highly accomplished, often with PhDs. They seemed to have amazing results, too, not just in test results but also in where their alumni ended up. But I wasn’t sure the right solution would involve an eye-watering amount of money. Growing up in India, the best schools weren’t always the most expensive ones. If anything, the ones with the obscene tuition tended to attract wealthy scions with little to no interest in difficult, unrewarding topics like maths and physics. Why would it be all that different in the US? Besides, it seemed like the wealthy schools were where all the horrible ideas began. It’s really hard to motivate wealthy children to do things the way you want them to, because everyone around them is successful, no matter what they do. Since they can’t use tough discipline or hark back to heritage in American schools, unlike British schools like Gordonstoun with a reputation for strictness, they use privilege talk to keep the children in line. Sure, we had some means, but it didn’t seem like anything good would come out of our child being in school with people with multiple times our net worth. I have a niece who went to school with Bill Gates’s kids, and while she is a rather enchanting young woman, it didn’t seem like the extra rigor did much for her other than keep her low on sleep in her teens. Her cousins in public schools seemed to end up in similar colleges as she did, anyway. Making use of Bill Gates level exposure mostly involves your parents having the wealth to help you follow up on the initial exposure. If we paid for private school, that’s basically all we would do with our money. And I wasn’t sure if it was paisa vasool. I looked at all the schools in my neighborhood, and realized that the small Mandarin immersion school around the corner was actually a public school, and hence free to attend, if you got through the lottery. I spoke to parents in my neighborhood who attended, and it seemed like not all of them spoke Chinese at home, or even knew Chinese (even if of Chinese origin), and no one had a problem helping their children with school. I applied on a lark, and we got in. We had arguments that shook the house about it, though — my husband didn’t want to confuse our daughter with even more languages. He worried she’d be discriminated against in a non-diverse environment. And the language barrier would keep her discouraged and unconfident. And why Chinese? Neither of us had any connection to it. What would she do with the language? By that point, though, I was convinced and held my ground on this. I’d been dropped in a Tamil-medium kindergarten where no one knew my mother tongue at that age, and I’d been fine — at least, in Mandarin school, the teachers did speak English. Hell, they even were willing to appoint a language translator if our daughter could talk only in her mother tongue at first. And, the teachers were obscenely more accomplished in Mandarin school than those in regular school, and even those in private schools. They had advanced degrees in China, came to the US on work visas like I did, and then transitioned into teaching. Their upbringing meant they cared about math and science, they were high-nurture, and had high standards for in-class behavior. My husband grudgingly agreed to give it a shot. Why Mandarin-immersion school is amazingI must qualify what I’m saying with the fact that it’s only been a year in this environment, and things can change as children get to higher classes. Highly-involved teachersI toured public and private schools, and the thing I found most lacking in American schools was highly-involved teachers. Most worked very hard, but they somehow didn’t have the level of classroom control to create a calm environment for children. I remember my own kindergarten and 1st std teachers, and their high-energy, high-IQ, high-EQ actions were very important in giving me a sense of safety so I could learn instead of tuning out and being bored. The Chinese teachers were a good mix of the high-EQ temperament in Indian and Chinese schools and the kindness and high effort of American teachers. They also had high expectations of students. In even the best public schools, it feels to me like order is maintained because the children are all from high-nurture homes, and the teacher is just happy they are meeting expectations. Not much is done to challenge students. My experiences with the kindergarten teachers, and what I heard about several higher-class teachers showed the Mandarin teachers to be the opposite - they take hard situations and hold children to even higher expectations, and are involved enough to help them meet it. Cultural festivals replace woke celebrationsSchools really need events and celebrations. It gives the school a way to fundraise. It keeps the parents involved and in touch with the school, and a way to feel part of it. It gives kids a chance to do things that aren’t academics. It allows the whole school to come together for a celebration. Religious celebrations aren’t allowed in public schools. Patriotic celebrations aren’t celebrated to the same extent. All you have then is Halloween and Thanksgiving, and the Winter Holiday. So…. people start adding in social justice-oriented celebrations, just to keep things exciting. With Mandarin school, there are Chinese festivals to celebrate, which tick all these boxes while keeping things interesting. Everyone’s already busy with these celebrations that it’s going to be hard to take resources away to celebrate anything else in a big way. The curriculum helps children feel connected to Indian culture as wellLots of aspects that come through in the traditional stories that children hear in school also tend to be ones aligned with Indian culture. Respect for elders. Complex forces of good and evil. A sense of responsibility. Learning Chinese also helps children develop confidence and interest in Indian languages. Diverse student body.A lot of the students in language-immersion programs tend to be mixed-race. This means there’s no majority that our daughter doesn’t fit in with. Since it’s a public school, kids are from all kinds of backgrounds. It’s easy to be in a bubble as an immigrant in a demanding job that’s not customer-facing, so it’s good to step out of that in a public school. This helps us maintain perspective for what’s really important. School social events tend to be cheap and accessible, and there is no monoculture to measure up against, which gives children more freedom to be themselves. What Indian-Americans Can LearnI must say I do think Indians abroad keep our culture quite well across generations, when compared to most other cultures. A big reason is that we don’t have a significant language barrier in partaking in our culture the way East Asians do. That said, there are a few things we can learn: Non-English teaching medium does not hurt children.In the US public school system, there are many, many language immersion programs. There are a large number of Spanish-immersion schools, several French-immersion schools, an increasing number of Mandarin-immersion programs, and a long tail of languages ranging from Korean and Vietnamese to Russian and German. Most of the language immersion programs are considered to be of much higher quality and have parents fighting to enroll their kids in them. Including parents who don’t speak the language! Attentive teachers are the core need of students. The language isn’t quite the problem, especially if you live in a society where you’ll pick up the dominant language even without trying, due to its cultural cachet. Spanish-immersion programs attract newly immigrated families, and the student base won’t be from as wealthy families as in German-immersion programs, but they are considered quite important in giving children the confidence to learn and to bring their whole selves to school. We don’t need a large student base to translate curricula into a different languageLanguage immersion programs follow the same curricula as regular schools. They also tend to have a pretty small student base, especially at the beginning. And yet, they put in resources to ensure the curriculum is translated into their target language with great accuracy. The failure of non-English college programs in engineering and medicine in India seems to have more to do with the lack of effort on the part of the translators and teachers, and not much to do with the language or the lack of interest on the part of the students. It is not an intractable problem to translate a syllabus into different languages. I came across a statistic that 85% of Indians continue to live in the district of their birth as adults. I assume an even higher percentage live in the same state they were born in. The population of Bangalore City alone is larger than that of several countries, including Greece and Sweden. Are there not renowned universities teaching in Greek and Swedish, with the appropriate textbooks? Why then should the many languages of India have a lower quality of curriculum and teaching than English? Language is a way to ensure the community’s interests are protectedMandarin fluency requirement for teachers in this case is a filter for culture. Even if a teacher isn’t of Chinese origin, the fact that they put effort into the language itself makes them connected to Chinese culture. There might be political differences (e.g. a lot of the parents are from Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora has a lot of immigrants who came here to flee the CCP), but they ensure an overall appreciation of Chinese culture and values. Besides, it’s an environment where the majority WILL be of Chinese origin, which itself ensures some kind of cultural protection. An involved parent community is quite resilient to funding cuts and other issues, and having this alignment on top priorities makes a lot of difference. Preserving culture depends on people setting aside their differencesIndians tend to think other groups are all united, but we’re the only divided ones. No, other ethnic and identity groups have plenty of internal drama and wild differences. For all the noise that is made about the CCP’s influence on America, Falun Gong puts up Shen Yun in a big way, which is quite explicitly subtitled “China Before Communism”. The difference is, they don’t go complaining to White America about their differences, or take the help of the system to shut down opposition. Even if they do so, they won’t do so in a way where the reason is seen to be an internecine rivalry. And what binds them here is their small aims and objectives - preserving language, being able to celebrate a traditional new year, and ensuring kids can read. The issue with Indian culture, though, is that we preserve it quite well at a superficial level all over - we manage fine with Indian food, Bollywood dance, rangoli contests, and ethnic wear. But the core is what we’re fighting about. In other cultures, the core has kinda worn off and become a touch deracinated and detached from its roots, so these differences aren’t as enthusiastic. So while we should pat ourselves on the back for having differences about important fundamentals, we should be able to set it aside enough to develop some kind of common core. Indian schools in the US are a nonstarter - the pedagogy of Indian schools needs to evolve.Indian teachers are the warmest teachers you’ll meet, and I’m always surprised that teachers in America don’t have as much ability for classroom control as those in India. So we have plenty of ability and talent. However, our teaching methodology is targeted at those who aren’t able to have their parents or huge resources to help them with their studies. Take CBSE schools, for instance. Classes and exams are all based on the NCERT textbooks which are cheap to buy and free online. You can learn by rote, gain great marks, and then use that to go up a socioeconomic class. In the under-resourced India of the past, this works great. The American system, however, helps you more when you have more resources. Richer schools can offer more engaging activities to teach concepts to children, incorporate more project-based learning. If you have involved parents, you can have them volunteer in the classroom to reduce the adult-child ratio and ensure better attention for all the children. Many people say Indians ought not be captive to the quirks of the American school systems and we should start our own schools. But if we do, what are we really offering our children? Now we know there are Indian Schools and Kendriya Vidyalayas in many cities in the Middle East, and even in Moscow. Why isn’t there a Kendriya Vidyalaya Milpitas or a DAV Sunnyvale? For the average Indian-American parent, the Indian school system brings back memories of rote learning, exam pressures, and few, if any, extracurricular activities. It doesn’t feel like an Indian school would be tolerant of quirky, high-needs, or neurodivergent students. This is not the life we want to give our children, especially as we have resources for better. We need to evolve a uniquely Indian pedagogy that goes away from the teaching methods of colonial Christian schools that considered silence to be discipline and abused children to keep them in line. Heck, even Catholic schools in present-day America have moved far away from the techniques they followed as late as the ‘90s. We’ve got to incorporate tried and tested methods that work well to create well-rounded children. Without a new, uniquely Indian pedagogy, it’s unlikely that Indian-dominated schools will be attractive to Indian-Americans. -The author Neha Srinivas, lives in the San Francisco Bay Area Hindu Parenting is a community for Hindu parents worldwide. We carry articles, podcasts, reviews, classes for teens and various other resources to help you in your parenting journey. Subscribe to get the latest articles and podcasts in your e-mail inbox. 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