My husband and I were
making a way to our seats in a dimly lit theatre hall where primary school
children were about to perform a drama. The big auditorium was full of excited
people murmuring, laughing, talking and finding their seats. There were two
people, a young man and a middle-aged lady, sitting next to us and talking in a
very musical tongue. My husband could not resist his intense curiosity so he
asked, “Excuse me, if you don’t mind, can you tell me what language you two are
using? I find it really beautiful.” The lady laughed sweetly and replied, “Oh,
yeah! It is the Mauritian Creole language. Do you like it?”
In the conversation
that followed, we found out that she was the grandmother of our son’s friend,
Calvin, and the young man beside her was his father. She said that she left her
country, Mauritius, for Australia 26 years ago, searching for a better life.
The amazing reality that she revealed to us was that even though she had been
living in Australia for 26 years now, she missed Mauritius terribly, and when
it rained in Australia she always smelled Mauritian soil and wished she could
have been there physically.
In general, it is
true that all immigrants of the first generation (who migrate as adults with
their children) may feel the same way as Calvin’s grandmother; their hearts may
always be in their native land with their families and friends that they left
behind, and basically, they might not be happy living in a foreign country. Who
knows, they may also regret leaving their country for the rest of their lives. The
‘the smell of soil’ after the rains might always make them feel nostalgic and
think of their homeland, instead of their host land. Such immigrants, who I met
and talked to, told me that the main or only reason for their migration
to Australia was to provide better education for their children, which would
obviously lead to a better future for them in return.
But what about the
children? Can they really live up to their parents’ high expectations of
academic success? Not necessarily. These children are sandwiched between
their home culture and Australian culture. They get confused when they are placed
in a completely different academic atmosphere. For example, I observed that
children, especially from Asian countries, go to Australia with their
experience of ‘highly textbook-based learning’, long hours of homework and
strict teachers. An Indian mother told me that when her son was in India, he
used to study many subjects, have different textbooks and also have regular
homework. Similarly, a Filipino father added that teachers are very strict in
the Philippines. In contrast, things were very different in Australia. Here, I
found out that exploratory learning is emphasised, where students are expected
to do their own research; textbooks are not the sole source of knowledge. And
what is more surprising is that there is not a single ‘textbook’ in primary
schools (from prep to Year 6), but the teaching-learning process is as, if not
more, engaging as it would have been with textbooks. School teachers told me
that in place of textbook-based homework, project-based homework is assigned.
Projects require students to collect information from different resources, such
as books, online sources, newspapers and magazines to complete their
assignments. Regarding teachers, Australian teachers are not strict at all.
They support student learning at the maximum possible level, but they are not
coercive. Any form of corporal punishment is prohibited in schools.
In such an inclusive environment, immigrant
students may misperceive the Australian schooling system and see it as easy and
relaxed as J. Li’s 2010 research conducted on twelve Chinese immigrant
children between the ages of 13 and 19 living in Canada, “My home and
my school: Examining immigrant adolescent narratives from the critical
socio-cultural perspective,” shows. Because of this, they may gradually
stop working hard or even listening to their parents. All they want to do is
have fun, and do no work. As a result, they may fail to achieve as much as
their parents had aspired for them before leaving their home country. There is
a good chance that these children may be lost in the jungle of unlimited material
exposure and an unfamiliar education system. Their identity neither resembles
the people of their home country nor to the people of the host country. They
may turn into Willie Chandran, the protagonist in V.S. Naipaul’s
novel ‘Half a Life,’ who was taken to London, by his Indian parents, and Willie
felt that he neither belonged to Britain nor to India. A Mongolian mother
shared her fear with me. She was worried that her daughter would not be able to
compete with her friends if they went back to their country. She said, “She may
speak English fluently, but when it comes to academics what will she do? I’m
scared for her!”
Therefore, before making a life-changing decision to migrate to a foreign country, it is wise to think twice; because the grass is not always greener on the other side as most of the people expect. All the sacrifices that first generation immigrants have to make for the sake of their children’s future may not be worth it in the end. One person’s success abroad can be another person’s disaster.
(Published in an English Daily The Kathmandu Post on Sunday, August 30, 2015)
robert@mail.postmanllc.net
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