Schools

The time has come for SL and I to begin thinking of the kind of school to send NN to. We had visited a public school near our soon-to-be new home and were told that we can only register her name next year.

I must say that there’s pressure to choose a Chinese school, as more and more Chinese parents do so for various reasons.

Recently, we asked ourselves, “why do we want to choose a Chinese school?”. Frankly, those reasons aren’t good enough as far as we’re concerned…

* Peer pressure. I definitely wouldn’t want to do something out of peer pressure.
* Learning the Mandarin. Also do not want to do so only because of that, not to mention the punishing pace of learning/drilling set by these schools. I believe there are other means of learning the language without attending a Chinese school.

Reason #2 is also the #1 concern we had because of the fact that both SL and I don’t know the Chinese language. Therefore, it’ll be a barrier for us to be of assistance to her in her education later on. We don’t believe in putting the entire responsibility of educating NN to the school or teachers and we don’t need a reason to do so. We need to be involved somehow. If language barrier means taking us out of the equation, then I think we have to look at other alternatives. Not to mention that, sending her to the school will mean segregating the Malay, Chinese, Indian, etc. even more.

That’s how we arrived at our decision and hopefully it is a good one.