Voices

'Checkbook' schools' motivation for profit doesn't make the grade

By Neil Arora (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-06-21 07:58

In May, I visited the Sino-Canada High School, a Chinese private boarding high school, to deliver a speech on Ivy League education.

China's international "passport" schools were once a luxury reserved for expatriates. Elite Chinese sent their children abroad for boarding school, but Western education was beyond reach for everyone else.

Recently, China's growing middle class has revolutionized the country's private educational system. Beyond Shunyi villas and Humvees, China's nouveau riche regard Western education for their "little emperors" as the latest status symbol.

A new crop of Chinese private high schools is reconceiving the "passport" school as the "checkbook" school, opening Western-style education to those who can pay.

Rather than sending Chinese students abroad, these schools bring an imitation Western school to China.

Sino-Canada, for example, boasts a Canadian principal and an English-language curriculum taught by dozens of Canadian teachers. The school could be any Canadian high school, except that it is halfway between Suzhou and Shanghai.

Sino-Canada's culture is thoroughly Western. Fliers invite students to pickup after-school volleyball matches. Former US President John F. Kennedy's famous exhortation, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country," is mounted on the wall. Classrooms have donation boxes so students can donate to victims of the Haiti earthquake. It even held a Christmas Eve fundraising dance party.

Nonetheless, the spirit of Lei Feng, the soldier who was lionized for his selflessness, does not extend beyond the school gates. Beneath their glossy exteriors, international schools are a lucrative business.

In my experience in private equity, education has emerged as one of the hottest sectors.

These private schools draw on the aristocratic style of Eton and Andover, but they stop at style.

Eton, founded in 1440, is a nonprofit. Etonkids, an international kindergarten backed by venture capital firm Sequoia China, is not.

Andover is "need-blind," meaning it admits its students solely on merit, and grants scholarships to those who cannot afford tuition.

International schools in China offer none. Some criticize China's international schools as a "merit-blind" playground for the wealthy.

It is easy to understand the superficial appeal of China's international schools.

Western education is an oasis in the desert of creativity-stifling, rote memorization Chinese schools. In addition, international schools are the first step in a carefully scripted 10-year plan.

International school leads to the undergraduate abroad, then graduate school, a triumphant return to China, an apartment and a car, marriage and children.

As with most multiyear plans, it is unclear whether the plan is producing what it purports to. Graduates of international schools, in spite of their dual Chinese diploma, are not educated in the Chinese way. There are Kennedy quotes, but no Confucius.

Nearly all of Sino-Canada's graduates, for example, study abroad, but it could be more the case that their atrophying Mandarin excludes them from Chinese universities than their English opens doors abroad.

Four years of being an undergraduate abroad compounds the problem. Add in graduate school abroad, and once students finish their schooling, they will have spent more than a decade isolated from Chinese society.

Given how rapidly China will change while these students are abroad, private education risks creating a generation of outsiders alienated to both China and the West. There is a Chinese saying, "The foreign monk can read Scripture," meaning outsiders have special insights.

But it is questionable how warmly a monk who reads Chinese at the middle school level would be received.

Although private international schools have flaws, they will continue to flourish because they satisfy both investors and wealthy parents.

International schools discreetly matchmake mediocre, tuition-hungry Western universities and mediocre, wealthy Chinese students.

The unspoken reasoning is that it is better to be mediocre abroad than mediocre in China. For the talented middle class, this logic need not apply. College abroad from local schools is the norm, not the exception.

Some of Yale's sharpest Chinese undergraduates come from elite local high schools such as Rendafuzhong.

At the same time, the sharpest expatriates enroll their children in local schools to immerse them in the local culture.

These "foreign monks" appreciate China's potential; it would be ironic if Chinese parents forget it.

China Daily