Today the New York Times posted its Sunday Magazine feature piece, “My Family’s Experiment in Extreme Schooling” by Clifford Levy, a longtime, award-winning correspondent for the paper. The teaser reads: What happens when you take three American kids and throw them in a classroom 5,000 miles from home where they can’t speak the language?
Presumably, the same thing that happens to immigrant children in America: they sink or swim. But here’s why the Levy children’s extreme experience is different, and—dare I say it?—special:
My three children once were among the coddled offspring of Park Slope, Brooklyn. But when I became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, my wife and I decided that we wanted to immerse them in life abroad. No international schools where the instruction is in English. Ours would go to a local one, with real Russians. When we told friends in Brooklyn of our plans, they tended to say things like, Wow, you’re so brave. But we knew what they were really thinking: What are you, crazy? It was bad enough that we were abandoning beloved Park Slope, with its brownstones and organic coffee bars, for a country still often seen in the American imagination as callous and forbidding. To throw our kids into a Russian school — that seemed like child abuse.
Oh for fuck’s sake. It’s moments like these that I’m convinced a subscription to the Times must come free with every membership in the Privileged White People’s Club.
Lest you think I’m totally bashing the Levy-Dressner family, I should say that I think it’s great that they decided to send their children to a Russian-only school instead of an American one. But what is irritating to me about this article is that despite his casually tossed-off line “I convinced myself that what they were doing was no different from what millions of immigrants in the United States do all the time.” Levy in no way examines the privileges that make his children’s experience so much easier than those immigrants’, nor does it consider the ways their experience did overlap.
For example:
At one point, after a lengthy discussion with several of the teachers, [the children's mother] walked out of the school nearly in tears. She was studying Russian, but she realized that she had missed much of what had been said. How can you help your children when you can barely communicate with their teachers?
Do you know how often this happens to immigrant parents sending their kids to school here? All the fucking time.
Also this:
They hugged me goodbye, clinging a little too long, and as I rode the metro to my office, I said a kind of silent prayer to myself that they would get through the day without falling apart. But Arden had just spent the minutes between class periods hiding in the bathroom so no one would see her crying.
How often do immigrant families experience this kind of fear and anxiety? All the fucking time.
Fortunately—and here we’re getting back to the privilege part—the Russian school their children attend is an upscale private school focusing on “humanitarian” education, not the kind of crowded, cash-strapped public school where many immigrants must send their children when they arrive in the US. Oh, and the Times paid the family’s $30,000 a year tuition for them. So while being immersed in a new language and culture was very stressful, Levy’s children were doing it in a closely controlled and congenial environment, with pretty awesome teachers:
[The headmaster] even devised a ploy for Emmett’s class: one of the school’s English teachers conducted a lesson entirely in English. “This is what every day is like for Emmett,” the teacher explained. One boy was so tormented trying to follow along that he burst into tears.
I would personally give a medal of honor and a million bucks to any American teacher who did that on behalf of a student struggling to learn English.
Fortunately for the Levy-Dressner family, their kids ultimately learned Russian, acclimated to the culture and thrived. That was no doubt helped along by having plenty of resources and very attentive parents, and being able to blend in superficially; had the Levy children not been white, they would never have been able to pass for native Russians as they eventually did, and their experience would have been very different.
It was not necessarily so in my town when I was growing up. Our school system drew on thousands of families who had immigrated to escape civil wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Ethiopia—so many that we had innovative HILT programs starting in elementary school, and a variety of core-curriculum classes in Spanish for native speakers in my high school. I’ve seen first-hand what those children—my childhood friends—went through to learn English and get an education while their families simultaneously struggled with culture shock, post-traumatic stress, poverty, and a racist/xenophobic society.
It made me extremely pro-immigration and pro-social assistance programs. It also makes me roll my eyes when I read Times articles like this one that can best be summarized as: Is there anything privileged white children can’t do?
No matter how progressive the place claims to be, I’d worry about my Jewish kids in a Russian school. I wonder if that was ever a problem.
The article doesn’t address that. And frankly, I doubt the bigotry would be significantly different or any worse than what non-white immigrant children are subjected to in US schools.
“I would personally give a medal of honor and a million bucks to any American teacher who did that on behalf of a student struggling to learn English.”
Slightly OT but
I didn’t know it at the time but one of my teachers did something similar for me. I was teased (bullied really) quite badly in elementary school and at one point one of the teachers took three of the worst offenders into a portable classrooms and treated them the way they had been treating me. According to my mom it ended with one of the boys breaking down and crying which is why this made me think of it.
A little OT, I hope you will indulge my small child-of-immigrant story:
My parents would never ever go in to meet the teacher on the scheduled day. Then the well meaning teacher would send home a note about working their convenience and all the reasons why they needed to come. They would be shamed into coming by. This would be so embarrassing for me, because now it was just my folks and the teacher, as opposed to a big group of parents.
Truth be told I don’t know the real reason why the wouldn’t come. It may have been their very heavy work load, and it may have been the language barrier.
But sometimes I suspect they were a little insulted by the whole setup at school. One time very early on, the nun who was the principal asked her and my father to speak to me in English so I could learn English faster.
Now my mother is a devout Catholic who would not contradict the RCC lightly. But in this case she said yes to the nun out loud and a big fat FU in her head.
btw great title
My international school in Mexico did half the day in English, half in Spanish. We got double doses of math, history, etc. Everyone graduated bilingual, which in my experience is better than monolingual.
@Becky: I’m not sure I agree with that. Anti-semitism is an unofficial state policy in Russia and much of the FSU. It is still not safe to be a practicing Jew in those places. The difference is that the kids in this story had resources that most immigrants don’t.
I understand the parents’ motivation here, but taking chances and experimenting with your kids’ safety so that you can pat yourself on the back for Having Principles makes me really uncomfortable. It’s not that moving to another country for work is irresponsible, not at all. But the adults in this situation required their kids to do something they weren’t doing. To me, that’s another reason why this self-congratulatory attitude is misplaced.
Going to a foreign country with lavish resources and an understanding that it’s temporary is not in any way comparable to leaving everything and everyone you know forever out of desperation and coming to a new country without money, language skills, or connections. Immigration is not an extended vacation.
@mischiefmanager: if you think racism and bigotry aren’t unofficial state policy in the US, too, you should try being a Latino in Arizona or Texas sometime. Or an observant Muslim just about anywhere.
Sounds like, “Grandma makes chop suey for the exchange student at Thanksgiving to make the holiday feel more ‘Oriental’.” No one is happy, and nobody learns anything, except that Grandma’s chop suey sucks.
@Carla: True that.
I actually really enjoyed the article. The Levys had a very privileged situation, but I don’t think the author tried to portray it as a ‘normal’ immigration experience, so he’s off the hook as far as I’m concerned.
I read it more as an account of a different kind of school system. After all, the article didn’t talk about how the kids adjusted *outside of* school at all.
And it might not seem like such a brave choice to immerse his kids in Russian schooling, but *so* many expats (as opposed to immigrants) choose to live completely separately from the host society that I think it is actually a reasonably brave choice. (The same ones often seem to be those who also can’t stop complaining about the culture they are living in, and saying how much better everything was back home).
I got into something of a spat about this article on Facebook by pointing out exactly the subject of this post.
Sigh.