Does anyone have insight starting a child in local school and moving them to EST/International later? We are Chinese and we're pretty concerned that if we put our child through international school that they may lose a life long opportunity to develop native level Cantonese and Mandarin. And I don't mean just fluency. I mean the ability to carry on deep conversations and connect culturally to the majority of Hong Kong.
That's why we were thinking that we might start our child in local school and move into an international school for high school. Assuming that we had the ability to get in of course...
Like most parents on this board, I am not fond of the local system, but as one colleague and a few friends told me, moving from local to international school is really easy for your child, but going the other way around is impossible.
At the same time, we're also afraid that a purely local education will either screw up our kid pretty badly and turn them into really unhappy people, or will not open as many doors as studying an international school environment. I'm sending them to the US for college for sure.
I am just really concerned that one day my child is going to grow up and find out that they've lived their whole life in Hong Kong and yet don't really connect with Hong Kong people. As a parent, I want my children to feel welcome and at home, not like an outsider, which is what many of my friends that grew up in international schools feel like.
I do have a few friends that I feel can perfectly blend with with locals and then completely switch into American mode, and all of them did local school up till either primary or secondary before moving completely overseas.
It's a real big dilemma for me. Want to know if any other parents have been seriously considering this.