Choosing a schooling option for
your Third Culture Kid (TCK – the new term for Missionary Kid – MK or any child
growing up in another culture) can be quite a stressful and difficult
decision. For some missionaries, their
options are very limited and home schooling might be the only option. For others however, there might be the option
to send their children to a local or international school (either boarding or
as a day student). These options are
often combined with home schooling.
After 10 years in Thailand we
have been through almost every option with our kids. It started with a local Thai schools combined
with some home schooling. Then it was
home schooling full time. Now all our
kids are at an international school (as a day student).
Each time the decision the change
schooling option has not been easy and things have not turned out as we had
hoped. The ideal situation would have
been our kids attending local schools and speaking Thai fluently and eventually
sometime in highschool shifting to an international school to prepare to tertiary
education back in Australia.
It started off almost to plan
with the 3 kids at that time going to a local Thai school and being fluent in
Thai. However, we had an unexpected home
assignment for a year due to health of my father and our kids lost most of
their Thai. Then we changed ministries
and were involved in ministry where our kids were with other Australian
missionary kids and there were no appropriate local school options.
By the time we moved to Chiang
Mai, a large city in North Thailand with lots of expats, with our kids much
older and with hardly any Thai, the local Thai school option would not work. Homeschooling was an option which we tried
but it wasn’t working well for our family.
So in the end we decided to send our 4 kids to an international school.
There were plenty of options in
Chiang Mai - Grace, Chiang Mai International (CMIS), Prem, Lanna, American
Pacific, Nakorn Phayap, Varee to name a few.
We liked the British curriculum option and considered Varee and Lanna at
first. However, our kids didn’t want to
go to Varee and when we applied for Lanna our kids were not accepted. That left us with the two traditional options
for missionaries in Chiang Mai, Grace International and CMIS.
You ask the missionaries about
where to send their kids between these two schools and you open a can of
worms. Some people are very passionate
in advocating for Grace or CMIS. Grace
with almost 90% of the students being TCKs from missionaries families and a
clear Christian mandate is definitely the more “Christian” school with
predominately Christian teachers (who need to raise their own support to teach
at the school) and overtly Christian events like chapel. CMIS has only around 50% of TCKs from
missionary families and less overtly Christian.
I would call it a church school rather than a Christian school.
Both are great schools. I’m sure our kids would have been happy at
both school but we had to make a choice.
In the end, we chose CMIS, because it would give us more contact with
Thai families for whom we had come to Thailand.
Although being such an overtly
Christian school and having a thoroughly Christian environment at Grace is conducive
to a Christian child’s spiritual growth, I’ve heard that one of the issues can
be what happens when they leave this “Christian bubble” and have to go to
college where environment is completely opposed to their faith. Some don’t cope well with this
transition.
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