Is there an independent school that exposes children to non-European cultures and religions?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Chips on various shoulders:

-- ungrateful foreigners
-- highly successful ungrateful foreigners (Potomac)
-- Muslims (burka)
-- elitists who send their kids to private schools
-- people who don't send their kids to DCPS
-- people whose private school search begins with big name schools
-- people who don't find the big name schools good enough

You're confounding a bunch of different posters, despite what you say.

And how does it demonstrate a shoulder chip to accuse OP of inconsistent desires, i.e. wanting to send her kid to Sidwell but at the same time complaining that (a) they don't spend a year on her school and (b) would waste her kid's time with all that american history nonsense?

You are putting words in her mouth. There is nothing inconsistent about saying she likes a certain school but is hoping to find something that has a more non-western, global perspective.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Chips on various shoulders:

-- ungrateful foreigners
-- highly successful ungrateful foreigners (Potomac)
-- Muslims (burka)
-- elitists who send their kids to private schools
-- people who don't send their kids to DCPS
-- people whose private school search begins with big name schools
-- people who don't find the big name schools good enough

You're confounding a bunch of different posters, despite what you say.

And how does it demonstrate a shoulder chip to accuse OP of inconsistent desires, i.e. wanting to send her kid to Sidwell but at the same time complaining that (a) they don't spend a year on her school and (b) would waste her kid's time with all that american history nonsense?

That's clearly not all that's going on here -- as the go home, get back in your burka, *that* type of foreigner, elitist comments demonstrate.

And her desires aren't inherently inconsistent -- it just may be a case where you don't find that bundle of goods in this marketplace. Then again, maybe you do if you look further/deeper, as some of the posts suggests. IB is all the rage for affluent publics and at least 2 of the Big 3 are marketing themselves as providing an education for global citizenship (and I think I've heard similar rhetoric from Bullis, Holton, and the British School well). It you look at charters, you'll find more examples (e.g. Washington Latin, Yu Ying). Globalism is the hot new trend in education at least in some affluent and/or urban environments in the US. The question is whether OP can find the flavor she wants for her DCs right now and at their grade levels.

I didn't perceive OP as asking for equal time (and, if she was, it was equal time for the rest of the world vis a vis the Americas and Europe -- which, frankly, is not such an outrageous suggestion).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

You are putting words in her mouth. There is nothing inconsistent about saying she likes a certain school but is hoping to find something that has a more non-western, global perspective.

So what do you think OP wants? It's completely obscure to me, and apparently to others here. You claim to understand her needs, so please explain the following:

1. Her desire for "elite" schools is backed up evidence she herself provided: the first four schools she chose to visit are Sidwell, Maret, GDS and Beauvoir. I honestly don't understand why she visits the schools that represent the most visible totems of western-oriented success (by some measures, not mine), knowing full well what she's going to find there, and then complains. Clearly she knows the school landscape, if she's choosing these schools. Can you explain her choices to me?

2. Why didn't she make her very first visits to some place like WIS or Oneness, instead, if she wants multicultural so much? From what I can tell from her posts, she has no plans to even visit WIS because it emphasizes spanish, which is a colonial language in latin america (tell that to El Che who spoke it), or something like that. And despite the repeated suggested that she look into Oneness, she hasn't bothered to ask follow-up questions that would indicate even the slightest interest in Oneness. Can you explain why she ignores these two schools?

3. I haven't heard a peep from OP that she's considering a public charter like Yu Ying which is chinese immersion, despite her protestations that she wants her kid to study Asian cultures. I can't fathom why. Some here would say it's because they're public. Can you provide an alternative explanation?

4. She wants an "elite" school that fails to train its students to do business in the US or Europe. Do you think that's actually reasonable, that it's a coherent desire that would sync with an viable business model?

5. Do you agree with OP that one year of US history is too much? Not only for Americans (because she says that not much happened in 200 years), but especially for her non-American kid?

6. Do you buy OP's story that her own school was wonderfully multicultural, instead of just another british-created school that gave her both her own culture (of course) and western civilization?

7. OP won't specify what language or culture is missing from the curricula she's investigated. How are we supposed to trust and help her, if she won't provide basic information to us? What language is she looking for then? Because you claim to understand her so well, please tell us how to help her.

I look forward to your answers. Please convince me that OP is not a whiner who is unhappy that her unrealistic expectations can't be met, so she takes out her frustration and hostility by calling Americans ignorant.

[Anonymous]

I was just looking at my 5th grader's World History book. Ch. 2 is Early Civilizations of Africa and Asia. I think the whole premise of this thread is B.S.

There is exposure to other cultures in both public and private schools around here, and they do teach about Asia and Africa. So the OP is just wrong - or she isn't being forthcoming about what she's looking for and what she finds lacking.

Pesonally I think the whole thread is a wind-up, and many of us fell right into the trap.

[Anonymous]

Personally, I think that the thread raises a reasonable question and that it has revealed a great deal of active hostility to a more global curriculum at the primary/secondary school level.

Can't tell whether the active hostility is widespread, localized, an extreme version of a more common sentiment, or just the droppings a few of the usual suspects, but it's not what I see at my DC's school where the general consensus seems to be that we want our kids to have a more global outlook. What that means in practice and how/when we get there from here is still up for grabs, but the idea that we could and should do better in this regard is considered pretty much a no-brainer, as far as I can tell.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I was just looking at my 5th grader's World History book. Ch. 2 is Early Civilizations of Africa and Asia. I think the whole premise of this thread is B.S.

There is exposure to other cultures in both public and private schools around here, and they do teach about Asia and Africa. So the OP is just wrong - or she isn't being forthcoming about what she's looking for and what she finds lacking.

Pesonally I think the whole thread is a wind-up, and many of us fell right into the trap.

Yes. My kids, who have done private and public, have both spent entire semesters on Africa. They have both studied buddhism and, get this, hinduism.

It's there, if only OP wanted to see it. But she doesn't want to see it, for reasons that we can't know, but some have speculated on.

Agree that this thread is a wind-up.

[Anonymous]

I don't understand that you come from another country to a westeren european one but yet you want nothing to do with teh country. Why come at all!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Personally, I think that the thread raises a reasonable question and that it has revealed a great deal of active hostility to a more global curriculum at the primary/secondary school level.

Can't tell whether the active hostility is widespread, localized, an extreme version of a more common sentiment, or just the droppings a few of the usual suspects, but it's not what I see at my DC's school where the general consensus seems to be that we want our kids to have a more global outlook. What that means in practice and how/when we get there from here is still up for grabs, but the idea that we could and should do better in this regard is considered pretty much a no-brainer, as far as I can tell.

There are indeed nutcases who oppose the IB and multilateral curricula. It's driven largely by an irrational fear of the UN.

That's completely different from what's going on here, though. Different posters appear to find OP's attitudes contradictory, unrealistic, or downright offensive. Nobody's even tried to justify them by answering the questions above. So it remains a fact that some are offended that she dissed spanish as a colonial language that is in some unexplained way inferior to asian languages. Others are put off by her apparent desire for elite schools. Still others are put off by her ignorance about what's available in the DC school system to which she belongs (why the heck hasn't she investigated Yu Ying or LAMB, charters that offer bilingual Chinese and Spanish immersion, BTW?). Others are po'd that she hasn't shown interest in their suggestions for WIS or Oneness. Still other people are also offended by her knee-jerk assumption that studying US history for an entire year is a waste of time. It boils down to OP's behavior, nothing more or less.

Look around you. The great majority in this area are pushing for more multicultural education, not less. Parents in this area are pushing for IB, the ratio of lottery applicants to MoCo immersion slots is 5-1 or more, there is demand for more immersion, there are start-up charters like Yu-Ying and LAMB which offer immersion in DC. I doubt the posters here are the anti-UN nutcases to whom you refer.

[Anonymous]

10:13 again. I should add that I know about the immersion programs in the area because one of me kids did one. No, I'm not an anti-UN nutcase. I'm just offended by OP's behavior.

[Anonymous]

There's some pretty willful denial going on here in the sense that if it were just a matter of OP having unrealistic expectations or conflicting desires, the standard response would be to say as much and then stop engaging. It wouldn't be to tell someone to go home or to put on a burka, or to explain how to separate the a-hole foreigners from the lovely ones.

RE Oneness School -- like Esperanto, it's not what the OP is looking for. She seems to want a rigorous fairly conventional education with a social studies curriculum that has a broader/deeper/different geographical and cultural scope than you typically find in the US. The fact that she doesn't embrace Oneness doesn't, for me, throw her sincerity into doubt. It's consistent with the preferences about education she's expressed throughout.

And a multicultural curriculum, especially in the US, is not necessarily the same thing as a global curriculum. It often takes a "We are the World" approach which, not surprisingly, might strike people from other parts of the world as just as nationalistic/isolationist as the dead white guys curriculum it replaced. Basically, it can just be an internal debate about how we conceive our own nation rather than a perspective that looks at the world as a whole,

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There's some pretty willful denial going on here in the sense that if it were just a matter of OP having unrealistic expectations or conflicting desires, the standard response would be to say as much and then stop engaging. It wouldn't be to tell someone to go home or to put on a burka, or to explain how to separate the a-hole foreigners from the lovely ones.

But I and several others HAVE said this - many times! And her response and yours has been to tell us that we are ignorant xenophobes. She adds some additional color about the undesirability of Spanish and US history.

Yes, there is one burka-mentioning poster here. But I can't say for sure whether she's a true xenophobe, or just po'd at OP's more offensive statements and is giving as good as she gets. You can't say what her motives are either, or call her a xenophobe for sure. Some of rest of us have experience working in multilaterals, kids in immersion programs.

You yourself talk about what she "seems" to want. And even you haven't taken on the challenge of defending some her more offensive remarks. Because let's face it, she's pretty hard to defend.

So OP is one of two things: (a) a troll, or (b) a certain type of easily-recognizable, supercilious foreigner.

[Anonymous]

More confirmation re the pre-existing chip on shoulder hypothesis...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:More confirmation re the pre-existing chip on shoulder hypothesis...

More confirmation that you're unable to defend OP against specific points raised against her. So you respond with substanceless snark and ad hominem attacks.

OK, I'm done with this thread. OP is most likely a troll and you, her biggest defender, can't be bothered to make thoughtful posts. Have fun. I hope you have the opportunity to live abroad some day, as I have done, so that you can widen your horizons.

[Anonymous]

And learn to hate the right foreigners.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:And learn to hate the right foreigners.

Was that supposed to be a come back?