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本帖最后由 patrickzhu 于 2013-2-4 12:42 编辑
这是原文，很长，内容比中文翻译的要多一些
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/ ... rgcjx-1226566868295
It's just a swot hop to the top
by: Alice Pung
From: The Australian
February 02, 2013 12:00AM
TINA Huang, 15, is what the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development classifies as a gifted child. The Year 9 student is undertaking the Select Entry Accelerated Learning program at Box Hill High School.
Running in 36 government schools across the state, the SEAL program was designed to stem the flow of talented students from public to private education by creating an environment that would challenge and stimulate bright children. Students begin Year 8 work in Year 7, and can complete their secondary education in five years instead of six. Or they can choose to undertake a more comprehensive Victorian Certificate of Education that takes three years instead of two.
Tina's parents were granted permanent Australian residency after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. With a university degree apiece, the Huangs wanted to give their future children, Tina and her younger sister, a better life in Australia.
They bought a small takeaway business at Elwood, about 8km south of Melbourne's CBD. London plane trees dapple the enormous Edwardian and Queen Anne-style houses with shade and lend the neighbourhood an ambience of class and continuity, but for a concrete block of rental flats. "That's where we used to live," Tina says, pointing to a balcony jutting from the building.
The beach is a few minutes' walk, but Tina never went there much. She just wasn't interested - it was not that kind of childhood. Every weekend, her parents would drive to the Asian stores in Springvale, in Melbourne's southeast, 35 minutes away, to buy cheap groceries. When her mum and dad were not working, they were usually sleeping, because their shop was open until late.
Tina would clean or watch over her little sister or practise maths. Her parents drilled into her that maths was the most important subject. Maths made sense, particularly in their shop. When Tina was asked at school to write about her weekend, her parents wondered what on earth the school was teaching her, not fathoming that in the surrounding brick houses, children's lives ruled entire Saturdays and Sundays.
"When I was about five," she tells me, "family friends came over, and their daughter had got into the Mac.Robertson Girls' High School. From then on, that was what my parents kind of expected of me too." Tina's mum and dad understood it to be a good school because it required students to pass an entrance examination; only the smartest students were sifted through. Also, it was a government school, which meant education was essentially free.
Tina's extracurricular activities promptly became curricular. She had always been a bright child, but her parents believed she could be further ahead. Soon she was spending most of her free hours in after-school tutoring, including on weekends and in school holidays. At this early age, none of it was her choice, and the extra work set her apart from her schoolmates. It also instilled in her the idea that time had to be "used constructively".
At 10, Tina was enrolled at a popular coaching college, one with more than 40 branches across Australia. Every Thursday after school, she would take a three-hour scholarship-preparation class. "I sat in a classroom and did a maths and an English test, followed by two writing pieces," Tina explains. "For an extra $25 you could also do an abstract reasoning test. They run the tests through a machine and, tah-dah!, you have your results and self-worth all summed up in a pretty blue graph."
There are now hundreds of such colleges across Australia, dedicated to drilling students in the skills needed to win scholarships to private schools, to get into selective state schools such as Mac.Robertson or North Sydney Boys High or to gain admission to state schools' SEAL programs.
These coaching colleges do not require any form of certification from state Education Departments and are free to set their own curriculums. The more successful companies, such as James An College, have many satellite offices in suburbs with a high concentration of Asian parents. Courses are often booked out months ahead.
I went to an information night held by one such college. I was advised the company did not teach "generalised maths and English skills", but focused on "techniques for taking scholarship or selective entry-school examinations". The session took place on a Sunday evening in the small hall of a leafy primary school. There were five Chinese and Indian families. With the exception of a boy and girl in Year 8, the children were in years 3 to 5. Three Caucasians who attended came without children.
The woman who gave the presentation (and ran the company) had the demeanour of an old-fashioned schoolmistress. She urged parents to find schools that filtered the brightest students from the rest. She singled out a small Catholic school in Melbourne's outer-eastern suburbs, which one of the Indian children, a shy girl, was attending in the hope of winning a Year 9 scholarship to a private school. "Half the numbers in this school," the presenter said, not hiding her sarcasm, "are studying vocational education subjects: fascinating subjects like horse studies." One of the mothers laughed loudly.
She mentioned how some schools wanted "well-rounded" students who were engaged with their communities, and advised parents that they could get around this by finding a topical issue in their local paper and getting their child to write a letter to the council opposing the cutting down of a tree or the installation of new poker machines. The letter could then be included in the student's portfolio, should they get an interview with a school.
She told us there was "no need to lock little Johnny up in a room all afternoon, forcing him to read about the war in Sudan", because scholarship tests did not cover foreign affairs or ethical issues. She knew the details of each company that administered tests for the different schools, the contents of past tests, and exactly how many students had sat for each one.
Near the end of the session, the presenter put up slides with sample multiple-choice questions from previous exams for us to answer. Finally, the presenter reminded parents that before a student embarked on this month-long program of practice tests, her company offered a 3 1/2-hour pre-practice test - at a cost of $150 - to judge whether the child should even bother.
"The scholarship classes I took were soul-crushing," says Tina. "A coaching college! Dude, there are five-year-olds walking around that place. What are you possibly coaching them?"
Still, Tina muses: "I am yet to meet an Asian child who doesn't do some form of consistent tutoring."
AFTER years of preparation, Tina sat the various entrance examinations for selective state high schools, private schools offering scholarships, and schools offering accelerated education programs. She was eight, nine, 10, then 11. Each year rolled by in vain. The entrance exams usually took place on a Saturday morning or afternoon, and the women and men in the community - the small-business vendors and managers and migrants with dormant university degrees, as well as the factory workers and at-home sewing-machine operators with their Year 4 educations - sent their sons and daughters along to these exams.
Raised in a culture that since AD605 has employed a merit-based civil-service examination system to reward academic excellence with tangible, life-changing consequences, many Chinese-Australian parents understand education as a way to shift class. With insufficient time, energy or resources to change their own circumstances, first-generation migrant parents generally encourage their children to work within the system. This has led to the almost exclusive emphasis on examination results, and often leaves the entire burden on the small shoulders of the students themselves. At the age of 14, instead of visiting friends or holding slumber parties, Tina spent a few weeks sitting in scholarship coaching classes after school, to "test them out" for her younger sister, who was in Year 5. "I didn't want her to go through the same awful experience I did," she explains. "I didn't get into Mac.Rob. I didn't get into a private school through a scholarship. None of them."
Instead, Tina made it into the SEAL program at Box Hill High. She has joined the debating team, become class captain and even taken a creative-writing class. Her teacher, Imogen Melgaard, tells me, "Tina's intellect is frightening sometimes, because it is so easy to forget that she is only a kid. At times I have to stop myself from speaking to her like she's an adult and my equal."
Each SEAL school is responsible for determining its selection criteria, which means students are not siphoned off by a single test. The inclusion of interviews and Year 6 reports means that the SEAL program takes a broader approach to determining which students to admit. Their personalities and characters matter. Melgaard notes that SEAL students feel a level of acceptance that might be absent if they had remained in ordinary classes: "They would be the one or two kids who would stand out and be picked on. But, here, they have their Doctor Who club and their chess club, and they bring textbooks to school camps. There is a strong culture of pride in doing well."
Half of Melgaard's SEAL class is Asian. She remarks that "it is fascinating how much Asian pride these kids have. They will joke to me about the 'Asian Five' subjects that students study for VCE" - two maths, physics, chemistry and English - "and also about the 'Asian fail', which is an A minus."
Box Hill High used to be a working-class boys' college. But its SEAL program has done more than just revitalise the school; it has helped change the demographics of a suburb. In 1996, the median house price in Box Hill was $150,000. Yet, as more and more parents moved to be within the school zone, property prices soared. In 2001, the median house price was $280,000. Ten years later it was $960,000.
The largest group of overseas-born residents in Box Hill is from mainland China, and the new migrants have added an air of cosmopolitan sophistication. Restaurants nowopen later at night and the eating strip near Whitehorse Road teems with families and fast patter. For new arrivals seeking manual or market work, this is where you can make connections and find out where to send your kids to school. Lined woollen blazers, alumni networks and new swimming pools don't mean much to people who might have been in this country for only a handful of years, but they're quick to switch to a system that boasts the greatest number of graduates to top universities, or the highest Australian Tertiary Admissions Rankings.
TINA and I are walking down her favourite running track. "I hate running," she tells me, "but it makes me feel good afterwards." We are in her new suburb. Her parents moved to Balwyn, east of the CBD, so that her sister would be within the catchment zone of Balwyn High School, which also has a SEAL program and whose students regularly top the state's Year 12 results. The family relocated their Elwood business to Canterbury, closer to where they now live. Meanwhile, Tina continues to commute to Box Hill.
I ask her what she is most afraid of. "Failure," she answers instantly.
But when was the last time you failed? "Does burning toast in the morning count?"
Then she says, "I think the fear comes from not being able to come back from being stuck in a horrible place."
On the day of Tina's Year 12 biology exam, she is hyperventilating and breathing into a paper bag. (At the end of Year 8, 25 of the 75 SEAL students at Tina's school are selected to study a VCE science subject. "So I'm, like, the accelerated of the accelerated," she tells me.) Confessing that she gets sick after every exam, to the point where she has to take antibiotics, Tina tells me that this one is particularly nerve-racking because the marks count towards her ATAR.
To prepare, Tina has completed 50 practice biology exams - 150 hours' worth. She sourced the practice exams from teachers, tutors and friends, and bought more online. Over the six months I spend getting to know her, Tina's self-esteem seems precariously balanced between soaring confidence and debilitating anxiety.
Even private schools are beginning to acknowledge a coached student may not necessarily have the type of rounded, inquisitive mind that they are after. Sydney Grammar School, for instance, strongly discourages academic coaching as preparation for its scholarship exam.
If the purpose behind education for the gifted is to ensure that the brightest students are sufficiently challenged, this idea of extra, relentless tutoring cranks the dial all the way back around to the beginning, where naturally curious intellects are no longer being challenged in the ways that matter, and students' skills are limited to test-taking and thinking within the rules.
My last meeting with Tina takes place inside a McDonald's in Balwyn. She tells me about her sister. Tina's careful scoping exercise for a suitable coaching college eventually yielded the one that hosted the information session I attended. "It cost $2000 for a month, and she cried every week of that month," Tina confesses. "But it worked."
So much so that Tina's sister didn't end up going to Balwyn High, the school that was the reason for their parents' relocation. She won a scholarship to Camberwell Girls Grammar School, which has annual fees of about $20,000.
"She did better than me," says Tina with a half-laugh, half-sigh. Then she is pensive. "I've never really met any Asian parents who believe the whole 'not everything that counts can be counted' thing," she says. "But I have that phrase plastered next to the 'How to Succeed in Year 12 Biology' sheets on my wall. It keeps me sane."
This is an edited extract of an article in The Monthly, out now.
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参加活动 朝花夕拾------风吹麦浪 (2013-6-6) 明河素月 
发表于 2013-2-4 08:52
