What’s The Deal With Local VS International Schools?

As an extremely multi-cultured school, AISG has a lot of students from everywhere around the globe. However, there are still a majority of students that transferred from local schools around China. There are a lot of significant differences between local schools and international schools in general.

Starting with the basic system, it is evident that local schools are more stressful than international schools. In Chinese local schools, students would start to worry about their academic performances at a much younger age in elementary school. It is possible that this might be caused by the competitive system that always pressures students when graduating from a school to enter the next (ex: moving from elementary school to middle school). On the other hand, there does not seem to be a large amount of stress when, for example, students move from middle school to high school. This then led to the interesting phenomenon that international or westernized schools’ students wouldn’t over-stress about their academic performances at a young age.

The students’ gradually increased stress as they grow up and advance in their education also illustrates differences between the local schools and international schools. As the eastern culture tend to be more collectivistic and treat students’ performances as more of a reflection of the whole family instead of an individual, many students gain stress as early as in elementary school. Then, however, a majority of students’ stress significantly decreases when students get to university after the “Gaokao”, a final exam for seniors of high school. Contrastingly, the western or international students would start to pick up some academic stress in late middle school and carry it on all the way until graduating university.

Many different opinions have also been put on this interesting comparison by students who experienced both systems in AISG. Raymond W., a junior at AISG who has experienced two years of local school and 9 years of international school, claims that his “younger age stress at local school actually sort of prepared himself for the stress felt during his recent years of studying.” However, junior Roy S. had more than five years of local school experience and states that “after comparing to my international school friends, the stress parents and teachers put on me really impacted my opportunities to play as a child.”

Some of the specific classes, such as English, is also very different between local schools and international schools. It is not the level of proficiency that is different, but the way it is taught. In local schools, nearly all the English classes up until the senior year of high school are only about learning vocabulary and grammar. In contrast, nearly the whole high school curriculum in international schools’ English classes are about how to use the language of English to analyze texts, evaluate authors’ intentions, and express students’ own opinions. This also drastically sets the two systems apart as local school students are barely learning anything other than the fundamental basics of English.

With all the differences, it is difficult to judge which system of learning is better than the other. Yet, it is important for parents to understand each system and make a suitable decision for the path that fits their child(ren). After all, each system’s own focus is to provide the young generation with good education.