Barang chgout wrote:For sure but teaching fish to climb trees is futile and damaging to the psyche of the darling little fishes....

StroppyChops wrote: ↑Thu Jun 28, 2018 7:03 pm Would it be safe to assume that (as a generalization) parents who are prepared to live and work in other countries are not traditional parents? Could this be a factor in why their kids do better in further education?

Actually, the comments about rootlessness and instability are on the money. I teach primary school kids from another culture, and it's a learning experience for me. I've always seen the extraneous factors of being a Third Culture Kid (and used to shudder whenever I heard the acronym TCK, almost as much as hearing Pastror's Kid or PK) but in my experience, and with some wonderful exceptions, most missions kids miss out on so much of the intrinsic value of a close family with a firm location. They might we well educated and entertained, and may even be the princes and princesses in their current community, but they are lonely, desperate for parental approval and attention, and spend their childhood making shallow relationships with peers as the families move about the globe.

To my mind, government schooling in Cambodia isn't fit for national kids, and damaging to expat kids who will one day have to compete with their own peers back in their country of origin, and even expensive schooling is often just diploma mill stuff ("Rudy is feeling [happy|horse] - circle the correct word". Thanks, Oxford Learning.) that involves waiting for the one smart kid to circle the correct word, and then copy her stuff. Previously I did not have a lot of respect for homeschooling (and still don't, when kids are homeschooled in their own country) but to me it's the best option for expat kids in Cambodia.

Just my 100r.

....Previously I did not have a lot of respect for homeschooling (and still don't, when kids are homeschooled in their own country) but to me it's the best option for expat kids in Cambodia.