Alpha School students in Hanoi participating in an experiential learning session.
Speaking of the online community discussing choosing schools for children, I would like to share my personal experience of studying at an ordinary school versus a famous school. What is the worst and what is the best thing about studying at an ordinary school?
My biggest fear when studying at ordinary public schools was not being punished by the teacher, being under academic pressure, getting bad grades, or having bad teachers, etc., but the fear of “being bullied.”
Public school classrooms always have boys/girls who are called the “class boss” or “school boss.” They usually do not study well or hard, their parents do not care much, and they are naturally large or reckless, with high “leadership” traits (a term I only learned and understood later). Therefore, they always assert power by bullying, bossing around, and beating up others at whim. Other kids are afraid of being beaten by the “boss,” so they often chime in to beat up and tease those whom the boss designates to be bullied.
I was born a frail and small child, so this was my biggest fear and obsession during my school years. Nor could I always tell my parents. Partly because I saw my parents were busy, but the main reason was that the more I told, the easier it was to get beaten in retaliation.
Saying that does not mean I was frequently bullied back then. I had to learn how to “survive” and “avoid being bullied” quite effectively. The first thing to avoid being bullied by the “boss” is to “hang out with the boss.” Hanging out with the boss, but you must:
- a) not be the boss’s minion, because minions will be ordered to do bad things and are also frequently beaten;
- b) not chime in with the “boss” to do bad things either.
Bosses usually study poorly, so I often gave them answers and found ways to tutor the “boss.” The “boss” was also afraid of being beaten by their parents, so they were also very worried about studying. If homework was solved and got high scores, the “boss” was also very excited and thanked me.
However, when hanging out with the boss, one must always remember not to become their “minion.” Because if you are a minion, you will be ordered to run errands all day and do homework for them. Therefore, besides “giving answers,” I myself also had to be respected by other classmates so that the boss would “respect” me. I also always tried to make my classmates respect and like me, because a boss cannot easily bully the “leader” of a group/class.
And one must also “risk one’s life” to fight back against the “boss” when bullied too much. There were times when I couldn’t bear it anymore and used a large piece of wood to strike a group that was bullying my brother; pushed a “boss” into a ditch, almost drowning him; and was even “suspended” and expelled from school for a few days for beating a “boss” nearly gravely injured.
I was so afraid of being bullied that when I entered Hanoi-Amsterdam High School, my greatest happiness was not the prestige of Ams School or the pride of my parents, but escaping the plight of “being bullied.” I was never bullied while studying at Ams School. Those years at Ams School were the most peaceful years of my student life.
That being said, is there any benefit to studying at an ordinary school? The biggest thing about studying at an ordinary school is actually what few parents expect most. Top students at an “ordinary” school will be far more confident than top students at an “elite” school.
In sociology, there is a very famous concept called “relative deprivation.” People compare themselves to others in the same context as them. For example, a student will evaluate whether they are good or not when comparing themselves with their classmates. A student in a specialized class will evaluate their ability against fellow classmates in the specialized class, not against peers of their own age.
According to psychologist Herbert Marsh and famous journalist Malcolm Gladwell, this phenomenon is called the “Big Fish in a Small Pond Effect” (in Vietnam, we derogatorily call it “a one-eyed man is king in the land of the blind”). This means that a student’s self-evaluation of themselves is inversely proportional to the popularity of the school.
Good students may (feel) very average in an environment full of outstanding students, and conversely, you will see yourself as very capable if you are in an “ordinary” environment.
The key issue is that how you “feel about yourself” compared to others significantly determines your learning motivation and motivation to strive in life. You will feel discouraged and bored if you always feel inferior compared to peers in the environment where you study.
An environment with too many outstanding people will make it very difficult to feel that you are an outstanding person. The self-esteem of lower-ranked students will be severely affected. Instead of becoming top-of-the-class students in an environment with average-performing students, these good students might end up at the bottom of the class in a school full of outstanding students.
Learning motivation will disappear and give way to pressure and stress. Many times, those very pressures will kill a child’s creativity, passion, and joy of learning.
It is estimated that only about 30% of students at the top of the class will actually succeed; the bottom 30% usually feel weak compared to their classmates and therefore put heavy pressure on themselves.
Back when I studied at the specialized school, although I was in the top tier of my class, I myself always felt the pressure to strive. The fear of being bullied was replaced by the fear of failure. When the expectations of so many people were placed on my shoulders—from friends, parents, to myself—when a child’s life only revolved around studying without anything else greater, this could break a child down.
By trying at all costs to push their child into a school full of outstanding people, with great hope and pride, many parents have inadvertently turned their child into “mediocre” or even “stupid” and stripped away their big dreams. Instead of potentially becoming an engineer/scientist/politician, the child becomes a hopeless person who has lost faith in themselves.
If given a choice, I would give my child a moderate environment where they can become one of the top students in class (in a well-rounded way), rather than encouraging or forcing them into a high-pressure environment full of overly brilliant students. My child will have the necessary confidence to build great motivation in learning and in later life.
