Family and Education

There is a special column about education in the family in this month's Tien Hsia Magazine. I have read one of the articles in that column today, and I felt sad after reading it.

That article is about WBES, a boarding elementary school in Taiwan. In the school's boarding program, children learn to take care of and behave themselves well. Most of their parents are happy to see them grow up and become more independent. However, rarely anyone discover that the children are either beginning to either miss their family or spend less time contacting their parents.

When I was reading the article, I thought of Betty, an eight-year-old girl I have encountered when I was a counselor in a twelve-day English camp. She was pushed around and almost isolated in the camp because of some of her bad habits and physical problems. She could not catch up with the English course in the camp because she had never learned any English before, and other children in her group often looked down on her. She spent most of her breaks talking to her mother on the public phone.

After a short talk with Betty about her family, the CEO of the camp found that she is single-parented deduced that her mother is probably too busy to take care of her during the summer that she sent Betty here to be reared until the last day of the camp, which might be exactly what parents of the boarding pupils in WBES plan to treat their children each semester. In other words, parents send their children to bording elementary schools because they do not have time to accompany with them.

What a torture, I almost ejaculated while reading the article. Some pupils in the boarding program of WBES are just like Betty; they have to suffer from homesick and perhaps loneliness. Others are beginning to ignore their parents and let their parents fall in pain of missing them. They might eventually forget the delighted, encouraging smile their parents would have each time they do well on their schoolwork or tests. They might not know what it is to return home every day and search for snack. What is more, they might not be intimate to their family!

The article made me think of a boarding elementary school in a different perspective. I used to regard boarding elementary schools as ordinary boarding schools, but now I finally see its dark side. Therefore, I would suggest parents who want their children to go to boarding schools to think carefully before making the decision.