International Education

Jeff Thompson, Mary Hayden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136357510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A study of the principles and practices of international education. Each chapter of this volume addresses a key issue in international education, seeking to blend practical issues with leading research. This revised edition includes a new introduction by the editors.

Part 1

Students in International Education

2

HOME SWEET HOME: A STUDY, THROUGH FICTIONAL LITERATURE, OF DISORIENTED CHILDREN AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HOME

George Walker

THE CONCEPT OF HOME

I never fully realized that I was actually leaving my country, which I had lived in for all of my seventeen years, until I found myself looking down on what had been my house, my school, my town, my whole world, from the window of an aeroplane taking me to a country I had never been before, halfway across the globe.

That cri de coeur, written by a student in Geneva, strikes an immediate chord with anyone who works in an international school. The disorientation of young people caused by the temporary, sometimes permanent loss of their ‘home’ is becoming the subject of serious academic research. Because of its deep impact on young lives it has always been the subject of serious literature, and it is through novels that I want to explore the questions: what is it that defines ‘home’, how important is it and is a stable home necessarily an unmixed blessing, and what are the implications for those in international schools?

I start in 1908, deep in the English countryside:

Once beyond the village, where the cottages ceased abruptly, on either side of the road they could smell through the darkness the friendly fields again; and they braced themselves for the last long stretch, the home stretch, the stretch that we know is bound to end, sometime, in the rattle of the door-latch, the sudden firelight, and the sight of familiar things greeting us as long-absent travellers from far overseas. They plodded along steadily and silently, each of them thinking his own thoughts. The Mole’s ran a good deal on supper, as it was pitch-dark, and it was all a strange country to him as far as he knew, and he was following obediently in the wake of the Rat, leaving the guidance entirely to him. As for the Rat, he was walking a little way ahead, as his habit was, his shoulders humped, his eyes fixed on the straight grey road in front of him; so he did not notice poor Mole when suddenly the summons reached him, and took him like an electric shock.

We others, who have long lost the more subtle of the physical senses, have not even proper terms to express an animal’s intercommunications with his surroundings, living or otherwise, and have only the word ‘smell’, for instance, to include the whole range of delicate thrills which murmur in the nose of the animal night and day, summoning, warning, inciting, repelling. It was one of these mysterious fairy calls from out the void that suddenly reached Mole in the darkness, making him tingle through and through with its very familiar appeal, even while as yet he could not clearly remember what it was. He stopped dead in his tracks, his nose searching hither and thither in its efforts to recapture the fine filament, the telegraphic current, that had so strongly moved him. A moment, and he had caught it again; and with it this time came recollection in fullest flood.

Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way! Why, it must be quite close by him at that moment, his old home that he had hurriedly forsaken and never sought again, that day when he first found the river! And now it was sending out its scouts and its messengers to capture him and bring him in.

(The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame, 1908)

I hope the immediate impact of that extract will explain why I have chosen to explore the theme of disorientation through the medium of literature. The temporary, or sometimes long-term loss of a stable, identifiable home is a favourite theme in literature and it is no coincidence that many of the examples I have chosen, though classified as fiction, nevertheless have a strong autobiographical basis. Why have I started with a quote far removed from international schools and jet-setting global mobility and rooted instead in the deliberately neutral culture of animals? Quite simply because I believe that the reader’s immediate and powerful identification with Mole’s emotions confirms that we humans, too, have a deep instinctive need for a home – something or somewhere to which we can belong, with which we can identify, which offers us stability and security.

My mother’s home was a village in Northamptonshire, more or less in the centre of England. We have traced her family back over three centuries, and none of her ancestors lived more than about 50 miles from her birthplace. Some of them came from the village of Helpstone and they must have known the poet, John Clare, whose rural surroundings affected him profoundly, indeed psychologically. In 1832 he had to leave Helpstone, a move which he describes in a poem called ‘The Flitting’. Here is an extract:

Ive left my own old home of homes

Green fields and every pleasant place

The summer like a stranger comes

I pause and hardly know her face

I miss the hazels happy green

The bluebell’s quiet hanging blooms

Where envy’s sneer was never seen

Where staring malice never comes

I miss the heath, its yellow furze

Molehills and rabbit tracks that lead

Through beesom, ling and teazel burrs

That spread a wilderness indeed

The woodland oaks and all below

That their white powdered branches shield

The mossy pads-the very crow

Croaked music in my native fields

(from ‘The Flitting’, John Clare, 1793–1864)
Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown
Ltd, London, on behalf of Eric Robinson.
Copyright Eric Robinson 1984.

Clare found the move to his new home in Northborough deeply disturbing, and shortly after completing that poem he was admitted to an asylum where he spent the rest of his life. Those two villages – Helpstone and Northborough – are just four miles apart but Clare, like Mole, had become an exile living in an alien land.

In modern, increasingly divided societies, more and more people are forced to live in exile, separated from their homes. Here is part of a poem by the contemporary Ghanaian poet, Ama Ata Aidoo, called ‘Homesickness’:

This afternoon,

I bolted from

the fishmarket:

my eyes smarting with

shame

at how too willingly and sheepishly

my memory had slipped up

after the loss of my taste buds.

Familiarly in an unfamiliar land,

so strong and so sweetly strong,

the smells of the fish of

my childhood hit hard and soft,

wickedly musky.

All else falls into focus

except the names of the fish.

While from distant places in my head

the Atlantic booms and roars or

calmly creeps swishing foam on the hot sand.

But I could not remember their Fantse names.

They were labelled clearly enough

– in English –

which

tragically

brought no echoes .…

One terrifying truth

unveiled in one short afternoon:

that

exile brings losses like

forgetting to remember

ordinary things.

(from ‘Homesickness’, by Ama Ata Aidoo)
Reproduced with permission of Dangaroo
Press, Hebden Bridge, West Yorks.

I want those two poems, written 150 years apart, to establish one of the pillars of this chapter, namely that in each of us there is a very strong, almost animal sense of home that forms a part of our psyche. I want to emphasize that point because I shall go on to suggest that most young people seem to adapt rather easily to different physical surroundings; and I shall also be drawing attention to the damaging aspects of too strong an identity with ‘home’.

DISORIENTATION AND ADAPTATION

It was in the second half of the nineteenth century that the disorientation of ‘homeless’ children became a popular theme in literature, reflecting an increasing number of lives thrown into turmoil by the industrial revolution. Tempting though it is, I shall pass by Charles Dickens and I shall also ignore that rich, but eccentrically British, genre of boarding school literature. But we should note in passing that in the best known of them all, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, written in 1867, it is only on its final pages that we learn that Tom’s closest friend has left to join his regiment in India; this is the first hint in the book that there is any existence outside rural Middle England.

Instead, let us move on to 1880 and to the village of Dörfli in Switzerland:

The valley lay far below bathed in the morning sun. In front of her rose a broad snow-field, high against the dark-blue sky, while to the left was a huge pile of rocks on either side of which a bare lofty peak, that seemed to pierce the blue, looked frowningly down upon her. The child sat without moving, her eyes taking in the whole scene, and all around was a great stillness, only broken by soft, light puffs of wind that swayed the light bells of the blue flowers, and the shining gold heads of the cistus, and set them nodding merrily on their slender stems. Peter had fallen asleep after his fatigue and the goats were climbing about among the bushes overhead. Heidi had never felt so happy in her life before.

(Heidi, Johanna Spyri, 1880)

After all those television serials, it was rather refreshing to go back to the original text of Heidi which had been read to me as a child some 50 years ago. I had not realized how fast moving children’s books seem to the adult reader; events whizz by! And Peter’s blind grandmother is a much more cheerful character than I remember her, despite her disability and poverty. I was quite unaware of the cloyingly religious overtones in the second half of the book, which my mother wisely suppressed. To my delight, my most enduring memory of Heidi remains intact – the magical description of the snow catching fire as the sun sets in the high mountains. I have now seen that for myself and I can understand why, for Heidi, it became such a powerful symbol of ‘home’.

I am sure you are familiar with the story. Heidi is ‘dumped’ as a five year old on her alienated grandfather. She comes to love both him and the freedom of the mountains where he lives. Some years later she is taken off to Frankfurt to become a companion for Clara, a sickly child. Heidi’s acute homesickness in an urban environment makes her physically ill and a wise doctor insists she return to her grandfather. Sometime later (in what was actually a sequel to the original book) Clara visits Heidi in the mountains. The young goatherd, Peter, deliberately destroys Clara’s wheelchair so she is forced to walk and she is slowly healed in the invigorating surroundings of her new environment.

The central message is the same as that of John Clare 50 years earlier and our own more than 100 years later: the essential equilibrium between human beings and their physical surroundings. But a number of other criteria for defining ‘home’, which we shall meet again and again, are apparent in Heidi.

1. In the absence of parents (sometimes dead, sometimes away on business) grandparents play a key role, in this case Heidi’s, Peter’s and Clara’s.
2. Siblings or quasi-siblings like the goatherd, Peter, are a significant part of home.
3. A change of home will often involve an acute clash of cultures, in this case between the naïve simplicity of mountain life and the stuffy, artificial conventions of Frankfurt.
4. There is the importance of education: when it was first published, the book was called Heidi’s Years of Wandering and Learning and the ability to read, which Heidi is taught and then passes on to Peter, is seen as a vital part of the preparation to move beyond the confines of home.

With the expansion of the British Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century a new genre of literature began to appear. Children’s lives were now being disoriented by their parents’ ‘service’ to their nation. Home was suddenly moved to India, or was it with an uncle and aunt in England, or was it really with the nuns of a boarding-school? The best-known author of this period is Frances Hodgson Burnett, and her classic story, endlessly televised and filmed, is The Secret Garden. The spoilt child, Mary Lennox, is forced to return to Britain when her parents die of cholera in India. She goes to live with her uncle in a desolate house on the Yorkshire moors. Through the help of a simple local boy, Dickon, she comes to know and love the local flora and fauna. She rediscovers the ‘secret garden’ that was her aunt’s before her tragic death. Mary befriends her cousin, Colin, isolated within the house with a psychosomatic illness, and his participation in the restoration of the secret garden restores his health.

There are obvious parallels here with Heidi: the theme of illness and the possibility of cure by achieving a better equilibrium with nature; the importance of the substitute parent – this time Martha, the Yorkshire maid – and of the substitute sibling, Dickon; the many examples of clashes of culture between the exotic Indian background of Mary and the simple, dour Yorkshire people of her new home, as well as the associated problem of communication as Mary struggles to understand the Yorkshire dialect. But we are conscious of a new dimension in this book. Heidi, despite all those snow-capped peaks and that heady mountain air, is a claustrophobic novel. The action moves from the tiny village of Dörfli, shut in by its mountains, to Frankfurt, shut in by its buildings, and back to Dörfli again. Despite the beautiful flowers, brilliant sunsets and free-range goats, you feel that Heidi’s spirit will never escape out of the valley.

In contrast, read this virtuoso passage from The Secret Garden:

One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live for ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender, solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws one’s head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvellous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one’s heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun – which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark-blue at night with millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in someone’s eyes.

And it was like that with Colin when he first saw and heard and felt the springtime inside the four high walls of the hidden garden.

(The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911)

Despite its high walls the secret garden is not a confining metaphor; on the contrary, it inspires a global perspective. Note the deliberate reference to the East and to the sound of far-off music. There are new, unimagined possi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Introduction to the paperback edition
• Part 1: Students in international education
• Part 2: International education through the curriculum
• Part 3: The school as an organization for international education
• Part 4: International education for all
• Index