Lost in Translation: Local vs International Schooling!

From deciphering Cantonese worksheets to hauling kilos of textbooks, the local school system can feel like an uphill climb for non-Chinese-speaking parents. But give it time and it all starts to feel like home. Andrew Spires reports

PHOTOGRAPHY BY Andrew Spires

If you type local vs international school into the World Wide Web, you’ll be offered the same information that’s been discussed for years; namely that international schools are great if you move countries a lot, that they offer a ‘global perspective’ and have a more holistic teaching style, whereas local schools provide in-depth local and cultural knowledge and proper bi- or tri-lingual capabilities. One is incredibly expensive and the other isn’t. But then you already know that.

So what I’m going to do is spend the next five minutes telling you what it’s like to be an expat parent of kids in the local Hong Kong system, as that’s what I am.

I need to caveat this article by saying that my wife is local and speaks only Cantonese to the kids when she’s home, which isn’t very often, as she’s always at work. That language base has given my two girls (10 and 8) a fantastic step-up at school. We also have amazing grandparents who occasionally assist with homework. Even with that local language help, both my kids visit the dreaded tutor once a week to help with their Cantonese.

The local system takes about a year to settle into. We chose our local primary based on their open day, where we were told they had a very strong NCS (non-Chinese speaking) department. Turns out they did not. Worksheets would be sent home nightly causing my doe-eyed daughter and I to stare blankly at them, fumbling with Google Translate to figure out what needed to be done. After a few weeks of this, I asked to have a meeting with the NCS Head and armed myself with an Arabic worksheet. Halfway through the meeting, I slid the worksheet across the table and asked the teacher if she could complete it. Now she was the one staring blankly. “But how can I complete this? I don’t read Arabic,” she pointed out. “I don’t read Cantonese,” I replied, “But we’re expected to complete them daily.” It was a lightbulb moment for the NCS department.

The local system is powered by textbooks. Hundreds of them. Approximately HK$2,500 a term’s worth. Each subject has its own volume that makes the Encyclopaedia Britannica look like The Beano. These need to be carried to and from school each day, like an educational flagellation. Little spines shouldn’t be carrying 5kgs. Scaled-up, that’s the equivalent of me carrying 15 litres of water. So, back into school I went for another meeting…

Homework is famous in the local system for the sheer quantity of it. It’s not just the amount of homework given, but the bizarre code with which it’s indexed. When my eldest first joined secondary, we spent equal amounts of time simply figuring out what the homework was as we spent doing it. Each type of homework is encoded with numbers and letters, for example, WBP8 is workbook, page 8. That’s an easy one. Then there is DWP: to this day I don’t know what it’s short for, but it involves online maths quizzes. It’s quite bizarre.

My final rant is about the literal nature of teaching in Hong Kong. My youngest is wildly creative, but that’s not viewed with any cheer in the local system. In P1, her textbook asked her to draw circles to make a chart for each of the different types of images on the page. As opposed to circles, my little artist drew little versions of the images. When the homework was marked, the whole page had a big red pen line through it, and a note saying she was asked to draw circles and that she was to re-do the work, even though her answer wasn’t wrong. Back to school I went for another meeting…

With all that being said, I’m starting to fall in love with my children’s school. There are endless ‘interest’ classes to choose from including, and I’m not making this up, ‘fancy skipping rope, choral speaking, Chinese acrobatics and soft clay’, to name a few. My two are in school teams, which are taken very seriously indeed, and rightly so. Inter-school swimming competitions have professional timing boards deployed and are carried out in an Olympic-sized pool, and athletics events use a starter pistol, which always makes me smile. Nothing like a blast from a gun to get your kid sprinting in the 60m race.

Academically, it’s tough and incredibly competitive. All kids, even the local ones, appear to use tutors to either keep their heads above water or to get ahead. All subjects apart from English are taught in Cantonese, although for maths you can opt to have the textbooks in English. Science isn’t taught as individual subjects until secondary school, so it falls under Humanities, which also covers sex-ed, politics and of course National Education lessons. Oddly, Mandarin doesn’t feature that heavily, with only one hour a week of instruction.

There is little in the way of thinking around a subject and a heavy emphasis on rote learning, drilling in a subject until it sticks. My two are both learning to read and write Chinese brilliantly, which always feels like a superpower to me, but they’re not learning the ‘why’ of the language, just the form, meaning they struggle to use it outside of the structure of the classroom. This is counteracted by having local friends. Most of my children’s Cantonese language skill comes from interaction with their classmates at recess. Culturally, this is very important as my kids are naturally learning local customs. They’re not just learning about Mid-Autumn Festival and Chinese New Year, they’re living it and adopting it into their own frame of reference.

On a personal level, I do feel excluded at the school gates as my Cantonese is only marginally better than my Arabic! I sign up to be a parent volunteer when my workload isn’t too heavy, but I sense the tension in the room when I walk in. I haven’t formed the friends that I might have done had my kids gone to an international school, and I can feel useless when it comes to helping with Chinese homework. This is all down to me not learning the language well enough, but worth considering when you’re choosing schools.

We have some western friends who started their eldest in the local system, but by P3 decided to move her to Discovery Bay International School, where she’s grown in confidence and is thriving. The kicker was that they couldn’t help their daughter with her school work which was leading to fights at home. At the same time, they were stressed by the focus on academics; they felt her childhood could be better spent. For them, transferring to an international school was the logical decision, and a little help with funding by Cathay helped to grease the wheels.

International schools are by their very nature more culturally diverse than the local system. It’s great that kids can mingle with varied cultures from such a young age. The connections made at an international school will also help them later in life in a global economy. After all, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. My local wife went to an international school in the UK and now has useful connections all over the world.

If I had the cash, would I send my kids to an international school? If I weren’t planning on staying in Hong Kong, then probably yes. But as Hong Kong and Lantau are very much my home, a local education is priceless.