Hot Topic: Keeping Your Culture In An International School

International schools, or any English-speaking school in foreign nations, have a pretty uniform curriculum. There's no room for alterations, especially if the school uses international programs like IB or Cambridge. And although I thank my parents for enrolling me in a nationally renowned international school I think that I have been robbed of my own culture.

Let's get to it:

In developing countries, your ability to speak English fluently is a mark of your privilege. The language produces a clear hierarchy, and the ones at the bottom are the unilingual speakers who weren't given the 'proper' education. But even amongst the English speakers, the pecking order gives room at the very top for those who speak it in either an American or British accent (or any variation of it such as the Canadian or Australian). English, then, becomes the measurement of your wealth and the promise of your future. Without fluency in it, your future is constrained to the country you live in and your ladder of success is 50 rungs short.

I am not negating the extreme importance of the English language. However, its position as the lingua franca has created such a clear-cut hierarchy in many countries that many of the older generations have opted to have their children abandon their own culture in order to immerse themselves in another. The suffusion of American culture have made the newer generation despise their own. We were taught what lifestyle is acceptable and 'progressive' and in turn, told to view our own traditions as backwards and downright stupid. Many times I've been told that a certain traditional practice 'doesn't work' and 'is stupid'. And maybe they're right. Maybe the pawang hujan doesn't actually stop rain, and maybe rubbing coin into your skin doesn't relieve you from body aches, but is it necessarily 'stupid'? There are plenty of people who swear by our odd traditions, and it's a bit ignorant to cross anything off that doesn't fit in Western society's norm. 

English speaking schools do much more than educate the future. They change our mindset. They tell us how to feel, how to think, how to treat the world. This means that in many developing nations, those wealthy enough to afford international schools will see their children act and speak as if they weren't born in their own country. Although it all comes down to parenting and how much they want their children to stay 'rooted', friends and the media also play a significant role in the development of our westernization. For instance, even though I strictly speak Indonesian with my mother, I still find it uncomfortable doing so. My parents have drilled my Chinese/Indonesian culture into my skin ever since I was a baby, but spending 8 hours a day learning about the world through the goggles of the West made me despise the pedagogy of my parents.

What's so good about learning Indonesian when our language is unacceptable to the ears of foreigners? Our expat teachers used to fine us for speaking Indonesian to our peers. We had to chip in a few Rupiahs in a jar as punishment for speaking our own language. Was it to help us practice our English, or because the teachers felt threatened that they couldn't understand our gibberish? Little did they know that whilst they were too busy penalizing us, we were compromising our own language for theirs. After awhile, our 'second language' became our first, and our mother tongue becomes only a skill we could show off in our resume. What good is four Indonesian classes a week when the other six periods a day were overrun by the English language?

When the government mandated Civic Education in our Indonesian class curriculum, my classmates and I were already too far down the rabbit hole. Civics classes became a joke, and those who excelled in it were the lucky few. We had trouble appreciating our own culture in our daily lives let alone study them. We were too busy inadvertently learning about American history through films and TV that we chose to discard our own. Being bicultural is possible, but difficult under certain circumstances. Because one culture will always prove themselves to be superior. I thought to myself, what good is my culture when it is dirty, ugly, and backwards?

The problem with that thinking is that it's justified in many international schools. The students speak English and aim to study abroad. We try so hard to shed the skin we were born in, and that's where a lot of schools go wrong. My school had Bulan Bahasa (Indonesian Month) where we explored the arts and culture of the nation, but a month to pull the students back to their roots is not enough when every other day we were pushed towards America.

I didn't know this was a problem until I graduated and moved overseas. When curious locals asked me about my country, I realized I knew surprisingly little. For more than a decade I rejected my culture like a bad blood transfusion, and now I'm trying to get it back. As a little kid I wanted to wear a white wedding dress when I walk down the isle, but now I'm planning to don myself in a traditional kebaya or batik dress. Slowly, I'm learning to appreciate the richness of my country and integrating it with my western thinking.

International school students shouldn't rebuff their own culture, because it's very much possible to have different cultures on our plate. We shouldn't think that one culture is more superior than another because there is no such thing as a superior race or history. I've thrown away so much of my roots that I have to plant the seeds again at the age of 20. So many cultures are in the brink of extinction, and I want to make sure mine lives well through the centuries.