Raising Cosmopolitans; Localized Educational Strategies of International Families in Shanghai

Raising cosmopolitans: localized educational strategies of international families in Shanghai JAMES FARRER* AND ANNA GREENSPAN† * Graduate Program in Global Studies, Sophia University, Kioicho 7-1, Chiyodaku, Tokyo 102-8554 JAPAN j-farrer@sophia.ac.jp † New York University Shanghai, Room 1237, No 155 Century Avenue, Shanghai, China annagreenspan@gmail.com Abstract This qualitative research documents the educational strategies of international migrants to Shanghai who are attempting to raise their children as cosmopolitans through immersion in local Chinese schools. We distinguish this localizing educational strategy from the established network of international schools designed to serve the families of corporate expatriates. Instead, our research subjects consist of self-initiated expatriates, or ‘middling transnationals’, who have chosen to prioritize immersion in the language and culture of China by sending their children to local schools. This localized, or Sinocentric, model exposes non-Chinese children to a challenging and nationalistic Chinese curriculum. Our analysis of these practices as a form of cosmopolitan education challenges both the goal of teaching a universal and placeless ethical cosmopolitanism and the assumption that a meaningful cosmopolitan education must take place in the idealized setting of a liberal cosmopolitan school system. We also highlight the difficulties families face in this approach, describing this as an ‘entangled cosmopolitanism’, an enriching but uncomfortable engagement with both local and home-country educational cultures. Keywords COSMOPOLITANISM, INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION, EXPATRIATES, CHINA, SHANGHAI The cosmopolitan appeal of the local On a rainy Sunday morning in late March 2013, a group of about 60 parents gathered in the auditorium of the New Century Elementary School in downtown Shanghai. The group consisted primarily of Shanghainese seeking a less harsh, more ‘Western’ educational style. Gathered together towards the back of the room, however, there was also a surprisingly large group of long-term Western and Asian expatriate parents. As they struggled to comprehend a two-hour long introduction in Chinese to Global Networks 15, 2 (2015) 141–160. ISSN 1470–2266. © 2014 The Author(s) Global Networks © 2014 Global Networks Partnership & John Wiley & Sons Ltd 141

James Farrer and Anna Greenspan the various virtues, philosophy, classroom structure, extracurricular activities and fees for the school, their children were downstairs, in a separate room, undergoing a friendly but rigorous selection process. Everyone was nervous, as it became starkly apparent that there were far more applicants than available places. Most of the families there had been through a similar process the day before when Aiju, a popular local private school with a class dedicated to foreign passport holders, conducted its highly competitive interviews; for the incoming year of 2013 Aiju had more than 150 applicants for only 25 places. Similar situations played out throughout the city. In 2012 Qisehua, a local public school known for its open-mindedness had nine foreigners in the 2012/13 grade 1 class. Demand also overwhelmed all the other public and private Chinese schools that welcomed foreigners. Until quite recently, very few foreign families had attempted to enter the difficult to navigate and often inhospitable world of ‘local’ Chinese schools. In the past few years, however, this has become an increasingly well-trodden educational pathway. There is a growing body of research on the cosmopolitan educational strategies of Chinese parents. For the most part, these take the West as the locus of international education and the source of cosmopolitan cultural capital (Waters 2006; Xiang and Shen 2009). As an area of new empirical enquiry, in this article we examine the educational strategies of international migrant families in Shanghai, which we define as families in which at least one parent is a non-Chinese national. We focus on a new, small, but sociologically significant trend of international migrants who are sending their children to ‘local’ (bilingual or Chinese-medium) schools. The particular financial and structural factors of a new class of migrant to Shanghai partly drive this phenomenon. Their choice of an immersion in local education, however, is also evidence of a complex mix of cosmopolitan aspirations and educational strategies that help us to broaden the definitions of educational cosmopolitanism. First, we argue that these localizing educational tactics constitute a strategy of grounded cosmopolitanism embedded in the cultural and historical particularities of contemporary Shanghai. Second, we regard this as a new trend towards Sinocentric cosmopolitanism, which aims to give non-Chinese children access to the cosmopolitan cultural capital they will need to engage with a future ‘global China’. Third, we argue that these experiences foster an entangled cosmopolitanism, aimed not at assimilating children to the values represented by a particular curriculum, but at cultivating a meta-cultural capacity for ethical and cultural self-determination through an experience of different cultural practices. Shanghai is a particularly productive place in which to study new strategies of educational cosmopolitanism in the twenty-first century, for it is not only an economic nexus of the transnational space ‘global China’ but also an important urban contact zone (Farrer 2010; Yeoh and Willis 2005). As a rising global city, Shanghai has become a destination for short-term and long-term international migrants. According to Chinese government sources, 173,000 foreign nationals were residing legally in Shanghai in 2012 (Kuka and Shi 2013), but unofficial estimates were considerably higher. During this same period, more than 60,000 foreigners and Chinese have married in Shanghai, with increasing numbers staying in the city (Farrer 2008). In 142 © 2014 The Author(s)

Raising cosmopolitans addition to these mixed Chinese/non-Chinese marriages, many foreign families have children in China or bring children with them. These families face an increasingly diverse set of choices regarding their children’s schooling, including international schools and Chinese schools, both public and private. Until recently, few foreign parents considered sending their children to Chinese schools. Most parents who came to Shanghai on corporate assignments in the 1980s and 1990s, had their tuition for international schools paid for by their companies, part of the ‘expat packages’ that included housing allowances, tax equalization, paid home leave and even a hardship allowance for enduring the developing country environment of China. These corporate expatriates and their trailing spouses typically chose to settle in an expat enclave that resembled a comfortable suburb, including international schools with carefully coiffed campuses walled off from the urban bustle. By the turn of the millennium, with the apparent ‘rise of China’ as well as the economic difficulties in Europe and America, Shanghai began to emerge as a desirable destination for young professionals from Western countries, many willing to work in China without any of the privileges of the ‘expatriate package’. These selfinitiated expatriates included many teachers, architects, chefs and hopeful entrepreneurs. Moreover, after the financial crisis of 2008, some companies ‘localized’ their expatriate staff, which meant that they would no longer cover the international school tuition fees for foreign staff in China. Shanghai’s international schools charged over $20,000 a year in tuition, in addition to many extra costs such as school trips and bus fares, which the parents had to bear. For many foreign families settled in Shanghai, local schools or hybrid local-Chinese schools became an attractive educational alternative. As one parent (Franny) said, ‘our package was local – so every penny counted – local school was the only thing in our price range.’ In sum, the group we are describing represents a new migration trend in Shanghai of ‘middling transnationalism’. These skilled migrants are incapable of achieving the ‘frictionless’ mobility (presumably) afforded by the corporate-transfer expatriates (Conradson and Latham 2005). They are also lifestyle migrants who seek an immersive engagement with the city, community and neighbourhood in which they live, and so more likely to embrace localizing strategies of education for their children. The expense of the international schools was but one of the reasons why these parents were choosing Chinese-medium or bilingual programmes. A wish to give their children a more grounded experience of China, involving the linguistic tools to engage with local people as well as an intuitive sense of the local culture they felt they themselves lacked, also motivated many of the parents. Informants were flabbergasted by the advanced mastery of Chinese their offspring showed, especially parents who themselves had struggled to learn the language as adults. As one mother, Tammy, put it: ‘I mean, the fact that this language flows out of their mouths and their brains so effortlessly – it doesn’t register with them that this is a remarkable thing.’ Keeping up these burgeoning language abilities was a reason to continue in Chinese schools. As another parent, Teresa, explained, ‘I want him to be as bilingual and bicultural as he possibly can be.’ Our focus here is on how parents and educators try to foster cosmopolitan © 2014 The Author(s) 143

James Farrer and Anna Greenspan dispositions and multicultural competency through their educational choices. This discussion addresses the problem that many see as most lacking in scholarly discussions of cosmopolitanism, the ‘how to’ of ‘cosmopolitan education’ (Bracher 2013; Vertovec and Cohen 2002: 20). At the same time, our ethnographic data forces us to question not only the ideal of a universalist ‘cosmopolitan education’ imparting placeless, culturally transcendent values but also the idealistic assumption that cosmopolitan education necessarily happens in schools with an explicitly cosmopolitan educational philosophy. Rather, our ethnographic investigation of Shanghai’s international migrants reveals a need for a more grounded, non-Eurocentric and critical conception of the practices of educational cosmopolitanism. For the families we study, much of cosmopolitan learning happens in the interstitial frictions between transnational families and national institutions, or more concretely in our case, the difficult adjustments that foreign parents and children make – or fail to make – to Chinese schooling. Rather than tracing the tenants of an ideal cosmopolitan curriculum, we suggest that tracking these frictions, failures and detours is central to understanding the pragmatics of cosmopolitan education as a process of mutual entanglement in which abrasive encounters with contrasting practices and assumptions form and transform goals. Data and methodology The primary data for this article come from interviews with European, North American and Australian migrants living in Shanghai. For the core discussion on parents sending children to local Chinese-medium schools, we collaborated on interviewing 15 parents of children who at some point attended local Chinese-medium primary schools. This group includes four foreign nationals married to Chinese spouses and raising children together in Shanghai. Since dual citizenship is not available to the children of such international marriages in the PRC, the educational authorities treated all the children in our sample as foreign nationals. The interviews took place between 2010 and 2013, and most of the informants provided continued updated information through further conversations. For the wider context, we draw on Farrer’s qualitative interviews with 300 expatriates, as well as international schoolteachers, administrators and children in more than twenty Shanghai international schools. These interviews and ethnographic observations provide information on the larger context of educational options, especially the international schools, which we can only sketch briefly here. Both of us (Farrer and Greenspan) have lived in Shanghai for more than five years and have experience with the local education system. Farrer’s daughter attended a Shanghai kindergarten. Greenspan’s experiences involve two children enrolled in local schools (see Greenspan 2012). This study thus represents a form of participant observation. There is no doubt that our personal experiences might colour our interpretations in this study, but such personal experience also provides insights and access to informants that would be unavailable to a short-term research visitor. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes are from non-Chinese parents with children 144 © 2014 The Author(s)

Raising cosmopolitans in Chinese schools. We have anonymized the names of the informants. Given the small (and tightknit) community of migrants sending children to Chinese schools, and the critical nature of some comments, we do not disclose any personal data such as nationality, profession or age that would easily reveal the identity of an informant and possibly subject them or their children to negative sanctions. Multiple educational cosmopolitanisms Parents and educators employ a number of different strategies in their attempts to engage children with the cosmopolitan ideal of ‘openness’ to a wider and more hybrid world. Based on our fieldwork, we distinguish four ideal types of educational cosmopolitanism that are useful for characterizing the options our informants describe. Internationalized patriotic education While states mainly design and control their modern national curricula with a view to constructing productive and patriotic citizens, national education invariably includes some cosmopolitan elements. In the Shanghai curriculum, this is most evident in the heavy focus on English language training. More recently, we have seen a focus on international educational competition, as in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, in which Shanghai outranked all other global competitors. There is also a tentative interest, as we show here, in admitting foreign students to the classroom to create a multicultural educational environment. This mixture of foreign language training, sensitivity to global competition and encouragement of student exchange represents a type of educational ‘internationalism’, albeit one that is far from challenging the chauvinism of national curricula. Despite these globalizing elements, China’s illiberal and patriotic education system preaches loyalty to the Communist Party and emphasizes a history of ‘national humiliation’ at the hands of foreigners, especially Japan (Callahan 2010). Nationalist indoctrination is not of course unique to China, but the Chinese context is what is relevant here. International schooling and ethical cosmopolitanism Arguments for cosmopolitan education have arisen from the essentially nationalist bias in education in Western countries. Scholars, including most famously Martha Nussbaum in her 1994 essay ‘Patriotism and cosmopolitanism’, favoured a cosmopolitan alternative to patriotic education on moral grounds. She argued that an educational system geared towards meeting the needs of the state was limiting, arbitrary and morally unsound. As she (Nussbaum 1994) writes: Why should we think of people from China as our fellows the minute they dwell in a certain place, namely the United States, but not when they dwell in a certain other place, namely China? What is it about the national boundary that magically converts people toward whom our education is both incurious and indifferent into people to whom we have duties of mutual respect? © 2014 The Author(s) 145

James Farrer and Anna Greenspan Historically, a global international education movement has emerged that aims to educate citizens of the world, in opposition to the national curriculums dominant in nearly all industrial and modernizing societies. One prominent example of this education in cosmopolitan citizenship is the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme, a two-year pre-university programme recognized by universities worldwide that places strong emphasis on ‘the ideals of international understanding and responsible citizenship’ (Mackenzie et al. 2003: 301). The global network of ‘international schools’, which attracts children from diverse backgrounds, has institutionalized a related approach to cosmopolitan education. Although many of these international schools follow a modified national curriculum, one of their most important goals is to foster the intercultural competency of their students by offering cross-cultural exposure, cultivating knowledge of other cultures, especially languages, and developing flexible, open-minded and tolerant attitudes (Hayden et al. 2000). Many educators in international schools try to capitalize on their multicultural contexts by actively promoting values such as tolerance, empathy and the promotion of international understanding (Matthews 1989). Educators use terms such as international, global, cross-cultural or comparative education to describe programmes that attempt to foster intercultural competency (Hayden and Thompson 1995). In sum, these programmes aim to cultivate young people with ‘intercultural maturity’ or ‘intercultural development’, ideals of cosmopolitan personality development that include ethical and political dimensions as well as knowledge and cultural ma stery (King and Baxter Magolda 1986). Since international schools have been the typical choice for the elite ‘skilled migrants’ who have been coming to Shanghai since the early 1980s, these schools and their attendant cosmopolitan philosophies are the primary points of reference for our informants. Shanghai’s international schools have increasingly embraced the IB curriculum as part of a commitment to a cosmopolitan rather than strictly national educational model. While the typical Shanghai international school of the early twentieth century attempted to reproduce a ‘home country’ education in China (Pott 1928: 99–124), its early twenty-first-century equivalent is diverse in both population and curriculum. The Shanghai American School, for example, offers both AP and IB curricula, as well as intensive Chinese language courses. The international school system is, however, by many measures, poorly grounded in Shanghai’s local communities. Rather, the infrastructure of international schooling and other services makes possible a privileged expatriate childhood of ‘home away from home’ circulating between gated residential compounds with adjacent golf courses, immaculately landscaped international school campuses and suburban shopping malls that could be anywhere in the world. By law, PRC nationals could not attend international schools unless they had been residing in a foreign country and had received special permission to do so from the government authorities. International schools thus remained segregated from ‘local’ Shanghai society, though a high proportion of students in many schools were ethnic Chinese with foreign passports. Despite a few limited programmes that fostered interaction with the local Chinese communities, teachers and parents privately complained that most of the programmes 146 © 2014 The Author(s)

Raising cosmopolitans aimed at bringing students in contact with a wider China were little more than tourist excursions. For the most part, international schools reproduced an elite-centred ‘cosmopolitanism of frequent travellers’ in which cultural difference was celebrated but contact with local society was limited (Calhoun 2002). Strategic cosmopolitanisms Quite apart from the wish to cultivate cosmopolitan citizens, a discourse of ‘global competition’ has increasingly emerged as a dominant ethos in both national and international educational systems. Unlike the ethical universalism of Nussbaum, this type of ‘strategic cosmopolitanism’ is concerned less with inculcating a moral worldview than with preparing individuals for competition in a transnational context (Mitchell 2003). In a borderless global market, an international education links children to the elite universities that give them the marketable and transportable credentials they need to secure jobs in transnational corporations (Brown and Lauder 2011). The instrumental accumulation of cosmopolitan cultural capital – including foreign language ability and cross-cultural competencies – prepares the child for cross-border academic competition. A common feature of elite international education is the focus on English-language instruction. As one educational expert put it, ‘when you make more money, you want your children taught in English. It is just the way it is’ (Lau 2013). In Shanghai, many parents and pupils perceived international schools primarily as gateways to elite US universities. However, families with children in international schools are not the only ones to adopt this type of strategic cosmopolitanism. Indeed, an alternative formula of strategic cosmopolitanism – one focused on ‘global China’ – can be seen among foreign parents sending their children to local Chinese schools. Chinese schooling as entangled cosmopolitanism Here, we describe a fourth, and contrasting, pathway of educational cosmopolitanism – one that borrows from and defines itself against the other models described above. Those international migrants who send their children to local Chinese schools often do so with a view to achieving cosmopolitan educational goals via the increasingly international, yet still nationalist, local system. We can think of this as a new type of Sinocentric cosmopolitanism as opposed to the Anglophone and Western models that most migrant parents saw as the norm. By sending their children to Chinese schools, such parents do not aspire to have them ‘become Chinese’, but rather to cultivate multicultural and multilingual competencies focused on Chinese competency. We attach a new label, entangled cosmopolitan, to the complex interplay of distance and attachment produced through this active participation in local Chinese schools. The concept, which emerges in the space between rooted and floating cosmopolitanism, is a version of critical cosmopolitanism that seeks to engage critically with both local and home cultures while escaping indoctrination in either (Delanty 2006). The messiness of cosmopolitan entanglements has an important affinity with the cosmopolitan metropolis. This, according to Richard Sennett (1970), is an urban mode characterized by disorder, complexity and irreducible differences. Through © 2014 The Author(s) 147

James Farrer and Anna Greenspan engagement with intransigent local social institutions, migrant cosmopolitans thus immerse themselves in cultural and social clashes that make city life both enriching and uncomfortable. The Chinese school is the institution on which we focus here. There are roughly 150 public schools and many private Chinese schools in Shanghai that accepted foreign pupils and that the Chinese Ministry of Education recognizes as following the approved state curriculum (so thus may teach PRC citizens). In practice, these schools differed greatly in the degree to which they divided Chinese and foreign students into separate classes, or even campuses, and curriculums. The most common practice involved the creation of an ‘international class’ (guojiban) and ‘ordinary classes’ (putongban). In some schools, foreign students and local Chinese students might study part of the day in separate classes; in others, however, foreign students simply studied in the ordinary class. In only a few schools was there a well-structured bilingual programme that integrated foreign and Chinese native-speaking students into the same classroom environments. In practice, truly balanced bilingual programmes were very difficult to manage. Despite the variations, parents who chose local schools generally wanted their children to have contact with local society in a way that was unavailable in the ‘expat bubble’ of the international school system, as the parents who experienced both systems explained. Nina said, I thought it would be nice to really get the chance and connect to the country and the people where you live. … You are so detached in international schools – you really are – I mean they really have to do China trips and have Chinese topics integrated into their curriculum in order to bring some China into the school. But physically already, you have the school bus. You hop in the school bus; you arrive in the school. It is a complete foreign and enclosed community and then you go home in the school bus. Franny went on to explain how: For me, China is living like this [in the city centre]; it is not living in the hinterlands [meaning the expatriate suburbs]. I have to live where I live if that makes sense. It is important to me. That is why we chose an elementary school in our neighbourhood rather than bus her somewhere else or do an international division of a local school. I still wanted to say ‘hi’ to my neighbours on my way to school; that was important to me. … Honestly, I do not care if Ornella speaks Chinese the rest of her life; I want her to understand people and culture. I am willing to give up my comfort and feel like an immigrant for that, because I feel like that is a gift that she will have [for] the rest of her life. There is, in essence, an attempt to achieve a cosmopolitan education grounded in the local spaces of a foreign city. In this sense, the aspirations described here share many features with what the philosopher Kwame Appiah famously called ‘rooted’ 148 © 2014 The Author(s)

Raising cosmopolitans cosmopolitanism – having one foot in the ‘village’ and the other in the ‘global village’ (Appiah 2006, 2008). His basic definition of cosmopolitanism as ‘universality plus difference’ calls for a deep immersion in the culture and practices of different, specific locales. ‘Without a deeply felt commitment to the local’, argues Appiah, ‘there can be no genuine sense of obligation to the universal’ (Freedman 2005). Though they do not employ Appiah’s language, many foreign parents in Shanghai want their children (and, by extension, themselves) to reside in a familiar place where they can feel some sort of rootedness or sense of belonging, while also expansively embracing the larger identities and universal ideals of a broader education. However, as our informants discovered, the process of ‘rooting’ a non-Chinese family in a Chinese city is more difficult than Appiah’s somewhat idealized notion of immersing himself in a Western metropolis while retaining a foothold in his ancestral African homeland might imply. As we shall describe below, the process of grounding one’s child through exposure to a Chinese education is fraught and often incomplete, driven by particular challenges and concerns rather than utopian, universalist ideals, which makes the task of ‘raising cosmopolitans’ complex, uncertain and sometimes distressing. Cosmopolitan frictions: the challenges of Chinese schooling for international families All parents spoke of how difficult they found it to navigate their way through an educational system and culture that was so very different from their own. For children with foreign passports, gaining entry to a public Chinese school was itself an onerous and opaque process. In the early 2000s, when foreign students in Chinese schools were extremely rare, gaining admittance frequently required personal connections. At private Chinese schools, the door to foreign students was generally open, but the process still could be forbidding. Erwin, a Chinese-speaking Western father married to a Chinese woman, described his experience of an orientation session at a prestigious bilingual private school: My wife had signed up for the Chinese language session, so when I went I was the only foreigner there and I was listening. I heard the mathematics teacher say, ‘Shuxue shi zhongguo renmin de jiaoao!’ [Mathematics is the pride of the Chinese people.] I nearly ran right out screaming. On his part, he doubted the value of the Chinese emphasis on mathematics drills in primary school, as well as the patriotic tone of the announcement. Other parents valued the maths education, but disliked other aspects of the system, including the nationalist curriculum. In theory, nearly everyone agreed that their children should learn about Chinese culture, but in practice, cultural adjustments placed a lot of stress on both the parents and their children, especially when facing conflicts about what values they wanted or did not want their children to pick up from school. Many parents saw benefits in the values taught in the Chinese education system. © 2014 The Author(s) 149

James Farrer and Anna Greenspan These are character-building virtues such as hard work, discipline and respect. As one parent, Octavia, put it: ‘at this age discipline and learning how to actually do the basics, hard work, following through, having respect; this is the time to do it now; and I think that is what is missing with Americans. No one ever does that.’ Nonetheless, longer experiences in the Chinese school system pushed parents to question their commitment to these values, or to the ways in which the actual functioning of the school system realized them. Discipline or busy work? The biggest dilemma and challenge was homework. Some parents complained that local children in second or third grade would have homework assignments that kept them up at night until 9.30 or 10.00. As one foreign parent Kevin said, ‘my kids breathe homework.’ Parents, like Franny, often found the requirements of homework burdensome, whereas their children struggled to fit in: I was, like, I am dying out here. I said, ‘honey, it is time to wrap it up.’ She said, ‘nope, I have more homework to do; [it has] to be ready Mom.’ She really wants to fit in. She really wants to have everything done. I think she really feels like one of them now. She is one of the 30 kids; because of that pressure, I think she wants to fit in and wants to get everything done. … We said we are sending Nora here really to go to school. I want her to be part of the class. She is not just going to sit in a comer and listen. She has to do her homework and participate. But, the reality is I know she is not going to be first in the class because she is not Chinese and I don’t want her to do four hours of homework every night. Chinese parents and children also complained about the burden of homework, but foreign families faced additional problems such as parent’s inadequate language skills. Both, however, also valued the ethos of hard work. Learning to compete One of the core values taught through the institutionalized practices of Chinese schooling was the importance and naturalness of academic competition. Through a system of grading, these schools ranked children against their peers. As one parent, Tammy, described the practice in her child’s school: In most Chinese classes, the smartest kids sit in front, the slowest kids sit in the back, but the teachers completely ignore the kids in the back. The kids in the back fool around; goof off; do whatever. And, that’s fine with them [the teachers] … they just concentrate on the top tier. Parents were ambivalent about the open ranking of students by their scores. On the one hand, one of the reasons some parents chose Chinese schooling was to prepare 150 © 2014 The Author(s)

Raising cosmopolitans their children for the kind of global academic competition at which young Chinese people excelled. Indeed, this brand of ‘strategic cosmopolitanism’ was part of the appeal of a Chinese centred education. Some defended the practice of class rankings by arguing that such competition was implicit in all forms of schooling, so why not make it explicit as it was in China. As one parent, Danielle, said, In Chinese we have a very famous saying, bu yao shu zai qi pao xian shang, [it] means don’t lose at the starting line. So, everyone thinks they cannot lose, so they learn this and that. ‘Oh she’s learning that, oh she’s not.’ If I put my daughter in the local school, I’d feel in that environment she needs to keep up with other kids. The problem with this atmosphere of competition was that most non-Chinese children struggled not only because of their own lagging language abilities but also because of their parents’ different cultural background. Teresa lamented these parents’ limited capacity to help: His spoken level seems right on track with his classmates. His reading level and written level are slightly behind. And, it is mostly due to the cultural difference, the special words, the special topics that are very much propaganda, and all this ancient Tang Dynasty stuff that is really special that his parents can’t reinforce. … It was impossible. Scott was translating this ridiculous stuff and we have no cultural background – no context. So, the thing that’s missing is the cultural context. Parents quickly learnt that teaching the value of competition was not the same as teaching independence. Indeed, a child’s success was a collective family project. In Chinese families, grandparents often take the lead. Foreign parents who want to stick with the Chinese system usually hire tutors to help their children. In no case could families allow children to face the demands of school without significant extra instruction, support and often pressure. Although a strategic interest in embracing Chinese educational competitiveness motivated many migrant parents, they learnt that acquiring Chinese cultural capital was difficult without the social capital of the Chinese extended family. For this reason, families with one Chinese spouse were better equipped to support their children and better able to sustain them longer in the Chinese system. At the same time, differing educational philosophies could be a source of marital conflict in these international marriages (see Farrer 2008). Pressure to conform Despite the prevalence of competition, most Western parents found that the Chinese system emphasized conformity over expressive individualism. An authoritarian style of teaching, including in some cases scolding the children loudly in class, was one aspect of this emphasis on conformity. As Franny reported about her daughter: © 2014 The Author(s) 151

James Farrer and Anna Greenspan I know that yelling is a kind of teaching style and she asks me, ‘did you get yelled at when you were in first grade?’ I answer, ‘I don’t think as much as you honey.’ She did get yelled at once last year and she was bawling when she came home but she didn’t do her homework and she did something wrong and she knew she did it wrong – but because of it she’s now very intense on getting things done. Parents also complained that, despite the emphasis on performance, the schools did little to foster creativity or promote genuine intellectual interest among their students, as one mother, Denise, explained: By fifth grade, I had certainly had enough of the Chinese education system, just the boringness of it, just the predictability. I’ve done my time; I’ve done ten years including kindergarten. Dealing with Chinese teachers with very, very narrow mentalities on education and how it’s delivered. You know, just seeing my children doing literally the same homework every night for ten years. In other ways, the education system is just stultifying. What it comes down to for me is, I worked in HR and did graduate recruitment every year and the kids coming out of the universities here, it’s like a cookie cutter factory. Very rarely did you find a student with an original thought in their head. In their responses and interviews they don’t think for themselves. As this quote indicates, parents often began to question the usefulness of such rigid educational practices. Some complained that the textbooks used emphasized conformity and a rigid moralism with little connection to the complexities of real life. One mother, Nina, complained about an early childhood education text: And, it was always this [sigh], so the sun is the nice, caring mother: ‘but little flower you have to take efforts to grow …’ and then the flower would make all the efforts to grow because the caring mother sun is giving her so much love. And, then, for boys [sigh], there’s nothing they could always get excited about. And, then, imagine composition! It’s all about the right moral message. Educational practices such as the use of class monitors – students selected to impose discipline among their peers – ensures conformity, respect for authority and social order. One mother described how the school used the monitor system to make sure that children played safely in the school. She had no problem with the goal of safe play, but she perceived the system of having students inform on other students as incompatible with her own cultural values. She noted a conflict between her desire to expose children to Chinese culture and a desire to protect and uphold her own cherished values of individual autonomy, equality and due process. Deep-rooted value differences about the purpose and nature of childhood are also manifest in the perception among informants that local children had relatively little time for play and socializing outside school. One of the primary expectations of 152 © 2014 The Author(s)

Raising cosmopolitans Chinese schools, namely the hope that their children would make friends with the Chinese children in the neighbourhood, was often unrealized. In addition to class homework, children often attended outside classes. When play dates were scheduled, parents complained that Chinese children lacked the skills of socializing, and even that the culture of spontaneous childhood play had seemingly disappeared among the Chinese children in schools. As one parent, Denise, said: I think that it is just not the thing to invite strangers into the home, that’s what my husband says. I think that is what’s behind it; they’re very uncomfortable letting people in, which is a pity for the children. They’re lonely; my kids are alright because they’ve got each other and we always have lots of foreign friends who[m] we invite over and, to be honest, my son has a lot more in common in the end with them than he does with the Chinese kids. The problem with the Chinese kids is that they do not know how to play. The notion that Chinese children ‘did not know how to play’ might reflect a Western bias towards culturally specific models of playing, although Chinese parents also made the same complaint. Regardless of the larger Chinese realities of childhood play, such statements represent a failure to integrate these migrant children into a circle of childhood friendships. As seen in the examples above, most of these discussions of differences in values arose around educational and cultural practices – homework, class rankings, authoritarian teaching styles, friendships and peer monitoring – rather than the course materials or explicit curriculum. Even schools that attempted to embrace an open and nourishing educational atmosphere modelled partly on Western ideas found it difficult to abandon or change these ingrained educational practices that Chinese teachers and parents saw as tried-and-true techniques for learning. For international parents and children, on the other hand, either living up to or challenging these educational practices involved difficult cultural negotiations. Learning ideology Beyond such implicit values taught through the regulation of behaviour, parents also faced a challenge of explicit ideological education. The most obvious example was the induction of elementary school students into party-oriented youth groups, which included foreign students. Most parents found that their children enthusiastically embraced these political activities, which, at the primary school level, were largely oriented towards being a member of ‘the group’ rather than any overt political education. One mother, Franny, described her daughter’s participation in the protoparty youth organization in primary school as follows: She marches around because she is a member of the junior Communist Party. She loves that. You start the xiao miao miao club – the little green sprouts. You get a green ling dai [scarf] for the first graders and second graders. After © 2014 The Author(s) 153

James Farrer and Anna Greenspan chunjie [Chinese New Year] everyone becomes a member of the little green sprouts, which I think just means you get the thing [scarf], and ‘we love China’. Then you become a red member after Chinese New Year of your second year, which means you get the red scarf instead of the green scarf. Ornella was ecstatic to become a member. We were like, ‘What should we do. Does this mean that she’ll be swearing allegiance to Mao for the rest of her life?’… Every Monday they have to wear their uniform and wear their green tie and march around. She loves the marching! Political indoctrination was not limited to explicit Communist Party activities. Since some of the interviews in this sample corresponded with the Shanghai Expo in 2010, one of the more common forms of state propaganda to which students were exposed was the attempt to drum up enthusiasm for the Expo through the curriculum. One parent, Nina, related a story about her daughter’s refusal to write her true feelings about the inconveniences in daily life caused by the Expo. My daughter said ‘no, but I can’t write that.’ And I asked, ‘why can you not write that?’ ‘Because only this is correct; we have to write this.’ And this was something that was starting to show. It wasn’t very obvious but it was starting to show that the children had started, and I thought that was scary. Beyond conformity to the official propaganda about government priorities, such as the Shanghai International Expo, many children also experienced nationalist propaganda of a more severe sort. The most common complaint among foreign parents was about the anti-Japanese education, usually in the context of teaching about the Second World War. Tammy described her daughter’s experience of a particular film: The one really disturbing thing that sticks out in my mind is [that], in grade 1, Abby was made to see this really horrific documentary film, probably made by Chinese on the Nanjing Massacre, and it freaked her out. It really freaked her out the first time and she did not tell us; the second time she told us. She watched it three times in two years; and the second time she told me … I got really upset. … I said ‘I’m going to talk to your teacher and you’re not going to have to sit through that again.’ … She goes, ‘no, don’t tell them, I don’t want to be different from everybody else.’ … It was all by accident that we found out she watched this film because Carl was getting ready to go to Japan for a trip and Abby was like, ‘you’re not going to Japan are you? There’s Japanese in Japan and … Japan is dirty and dangerous!’ … He said, ‘Abby, Japan is a lot of things, but those two it is not.’ … Then I said, ‘where did you hear this, where did you get this information?’ And it got to, ‘well we saw this film and it showed the Japanese killing the Chinese and throwing them into a big ditch and letting them die and blah blah blah blah blah’ and I don’t know what the film was but it just sounded horrible. These seven year-old kids are not supposed to be watching, and we don’t let them watch, adult films, at all! I 154 © 2014 The Author(s)

Raising cosmopolitans mean they don’t have televisions; they don’t have access to the news, except for newspapers. When one parent complained about his second-grade child having to watch these films with graphic violence, the teacher responded that Hollywood films were equally violent. ‘I had to tell her, “but we never let our kids watch those Hollywood films!”’ The school told other parents that their children were not necessarily required to watch, but that children reacted negatively to being singled out. In general, the parents felt that such blatant forms of political indoctrination were rare enough to tolerate and that they could combat it with home instruction. However, some parents stated this as a factor in their decision to give up on local schooling. The broader lessons that most children of foreign parents learnt in Chinese schools – though not always intentionally – was that the values of their parents and those of the school system might conflict and that they could be caught in the middle. They had to learn to navigate their way around these different values systems, as did their parents and occasionally the teachers. Parents, in turn, became much more aware of the values they brought with them to China, which they might not want to let go of in the process of education. Cultivating a capacity to engage in cultural and political critiques was not the intention of the Chinese national curriculum, but rather an outcome of this frictional dialogue between the home and school cultures. Not fitting in Most of the foreign children who entered Chinese schools started very young, having moved on from Chinese day care to primary school. Nonetheless, despite growing up in China, many parents felt that their children had never really been able to fit into the Chinese school system. Although sometimes they perceived this as a kind of ‘positive discrimination’, it was, as Nina related, still alienating: I think we had always very good experience with treatment, integration and teachers. It was always a slight danger of positive discrimination. Putting the girls in the first row, centre space of the choir concert … little blonde girl … having her on the stage and doing the speech; having her on the Monday assembly when they do the flag rising ceremony in order to show off with the little blonde girl because she was the only one in school. For most foreign parents, sending their children to a local Chinese school was an experiment, a partial and temporary immersion in a foreign culture. It was a cosmopolitan educational pathway through China but with a destination somewhere beyond China. Experiences with Chinese education made parents keenly aware of the distinction between the values taught in the Western and Chinese educational systems. All informants foresaw a transition to a more ‘Western’ style educational environment. For those who could afford it, this meant a transition to the international school system, which migrant families in Shanghai still see as the ‘norm’. For others © 2014 The Author(s) 155

James Farrer and Anna Greenspan it meant leaving China, home schooling or perhaps boarding school. Nina described how her child managed the transition from a Chinese public school to a more Western-style education at the international division of a Chinese private school. For me, the most basic and perhaps what matters most, if it comes to a comparison between the Western and Chinese system is …, and I think that Americans do it best or they do it to the most extreme, is teaching by encouraging and by strengthening a child’s self-esteem. … ‘You’re doing great! Look at that! Fantastic! How nice! Keep on!’ They don’t get that from a Chinese school because I think good performance is taken for granted. Good performance is what is expected. She emphasized that in both systems, the teachers were equally dedicated, but that the styles and expectations were different. Not everyone valued the systems equally and some saw them as teaching radically different values. A more extreme viewpoint, which one Chinese-American woman half-joking expressed, was that ‘we all know that if you want your child to [be] street smart you educate him the Chinese way, but if you want him to be honest you educate him the American way.’ While many parents might question that formula, most came away from switching school systems with the perception that cultural differences were real and that teaching methods were as important as the knowledge attained. They achieved a cosmopolitan education – or the capacity to cope with difference – by traversing these differences rather than sticking to one system. Frustration, or even failure was endemic to the journey, but this did not entail a rejection of the experience. Conclusion: a grounded cosmopolitan education As outlined above, migrant families in Shanghai face multiple institutional options, all with their embedded models of educational cosmopolitanism. Among expatriates, the most well-trodden (and well-documented) pathway involves educating children within the ‘expat bubble’ of the international school system, a system with strongly articulated elements of both ethical and strategic cosmopolitanism. Here, however, we have outlined a new phenomenon of parents educating their children in a linguistically and culturally alien local Shanghainese school system. By comparing these institutional pathways, we can outline two radically different approaches to ‘cosmopolitanism’ in education. In the one pattern, migrant parents avail themselves of a well-developed and sophisticated system of international schools that is truly ‘global’ but nevertheless serves to insulate children from many of the practical lessons of cross-border living, including a deeper engagement with local society and culture. This is largely an education into the ‘cosmopolitanism of frequent travellers’, as children of transnational managers and professionals who generally enjoy relatively frictionless movement across borders (Calhoun 2002). Such international schooling offers important cultural resources for participating in globalized educational competition, 156 © 2014 The Author(s)

Raising cosmopolitans but largely represents a floating cosmopolitanism this is overwhelmingly Western, Anglophone and open only to the economically elite. In the relatively new Sinocentric pattern we describe here, non-Chinese migrant parents try to educate their children to be cosmopolitans by exposing them to a Chinese educational system one might generally describe as nationalistic and rigid in its methods. Both migrant parents and their children reported great difficulty adjusting to this system and we describe this as a form of entangled cosmopolitanism, produced through an education in local life and a confrontation with irreconcilable differences. In negotiating these differences, a critical practice of educational cosmopolitanism comes into view, one based not on positive intellectual indoctrination but rather on the experience of being both within and outside the system into which one immerses. Insofar as this type of partial belonging constitutes an aspirational cosmopolitanism, it is an inherently subversive one. Migrants who engage with a local Chinese school find total identification impossible. With this lack of identification comes a questioning of the nationalist conditioning to which they are exposed. At the same time, participation in a Chinese school may bring them to question the assumptions of their ‘home’ culture. This scepticism, at least potentially, can form the ground for a kind of critical cosmopolitan practice not based on the abstract universality of the human condition but rather on grappling with a multiplicity of cultural practices that are not reducible to simple differences in ideology. There is no concealing the fact that these frictions were also painful. Many parents managed them by moving their children between systems. Indeed, without exception, all our informants who chose local schools stuck with their choice for the early years and then, by the time their children were teenagers, they moved them to some form of international education, home schooling or education back home. Nonetheless, our informants emphasized that they did not consider the change a failure because they had succeeded in their goal of exposing their children to Chinese language and culture. Such entangled cosmopolitanism thus involved a strategic sampling of a variety of educational styles and a critical dialogue between the migrant’s expectations and local practices. We might say that while a traditional international education aims to prepare children for a frictionless ‘global’ world of fierce, but foreseeable competition, the migrant strategy of localized education accepts the abrasions and inconsistencies of unforeseeable circumstances. As Appiah pointed out, cosmopolitanism is an imperfect project. It is not a smooth process of acquiring cosmopolitan cultural capital, but it involves facing, scrutinizing and partially internalizing conflicting cultural values. His idea of grounded cosmopolitanism reminds us that even in a highly mobile world there are immobile things from which you cannot get away, the stuck aspects of institutions, nations and cultures. As one parent, Tammy, noted: Part of what you like about it, what you think is valuable about the local school education is the knowledge that there is true cultural difference and you need to be able to deal with it … if you can cope with this extreme difference in your schooling then you are going to be better prepared for the world. © 2014 The Author(s) 157

James Farrer and Anna Greenspan An education that involves confronting real cultural difference risks painful compromises and even abject failures. No doubt, this report presents a cautionary view of immigrant incorporation in Chinese schools. A Chinese education does not seem to provide the assurances or openings of assimilation that Western international education has come to promise (with many caveats). Moreover, our informants were unwilling to go ‘all the way’ towards assimilation into the local society (even if this were possible). No one we interviewed described themselves or their children as ‘becoming’ or aspiring to become Chinese. Rather, this pattern of educational experience seems to offer membership in the ranks of what, in The global soul, Pico Iyer referred to as ‘fellow in-betweeners’, ‘offshore beings’ or ‘changelings’, whose hybrid interminglings were flexible enough to adapt to the ‘new and unexpected combinations’ that constitute the ‘masala fusions of our times’ (Iyer 2000). Entangled cosmopolitanism is less an identity than a dialogue. A cosmopolitan dialogue should work both ways in that it should also enrich the surrounding community. At a community level, there is evidence to suggest that the presence of foreign children in local schools in Shanghai was having an effect on their teachers and on the other children with whom they interacted every day. These ‘rooted’ interactions could make a deep personal difference. As Tammy recalled: Zhu Laoshi was the homeroom teacher, and she was really good. [She] didn’t speak a lick of English, so they had to revert to Chinese, right? So, she wrote this lovely, lovely note; I think I kept it. It was in Chinese but I had someone translate it and it said, ‘Amy is a surprising kid. This foreign kid has touched my heart.’ Through their educational choices, these migrants were not only transforming themselves but also helping to change local schools and contribute to the cosmopolitan texture of local urban life in Shanghai. Acknowledgements A grant from the government-funded National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2010-32AB00009), the Sophia Institute of Comparative Culture, and a Sophia University intra-university research grant supported this work. References Appiah, K. A. (2006) ‘The case for contamination’, New York Times, 1 January, available at: www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/magazine/01cosmopolitan.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Appiah, K. A. (2008) ‘Education for global citizenship’, Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 107 (1), 83–99, doi: 10.1111/j.1744-7984.2008.00133.x. Bracher, M. (2013) ‘Educating for cosmopolitanism: lessons from cognitive science’, in M. Raja, H. Stringer and Z. VandeZande (eds) Critical pedagogy and global literature: worldly teaching, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 25–46. 158 © 2014 The Author(s)

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