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Yesterday On Point did an interview with Maya Frost, author of The New Global Student, a book advising teenagers to quit high school and go abroad, where they can pick up college credits, foreign languages, and global skills. I bought her book and had finished it by the time the program re-aired in the evening.

I followed a path similar to the one she recommends and I agree with most of what she says (although how she says it sometimes grates — more on that below). When I was fifteen I studied abroad in Germany, but not on any formal exchange program. I just moved in with my grandparents and enrolled directly in the local public high school. That same year an American girlfriend moved in with my aunt and uncle, also living in Germany, and their daughter went to live with my friend's parents in California. Arranging these exchanges is pretty straightforward if you know someone — or know someone who knows someone who knows someone — willing to swap children for a few months. It makes no sense to pay an agency $10,000 or more to go to the trouble for you, and Frost's book provides several tips on setting something up in a country even if you have no contacts (yet). She rightly calls most of these agencies a waste of money, with the notable exception of organizations like Rotary that provide scholarship funding.

She argues that students shouldn't wait until college (or later) to do this. Young brains are still flexible, she says, and the impact of living in another culture will do more for a teenager than it will for someone over twenty. Adolescence is a period of intensity. Teenagers notice everything around them; they are not even capable of shutting that part of their brain off, of getting stuck in a rut, of saying "but we always do things this way…" That intensity is inevitably going to go somewhere, and it's better to direct at something real, like foreign travel, than to stifle it in the world of shopping, malls, prom queens, and video games. Young people also pick up languages faster. Exposing the teenage brain to another culture will pay off for a student's entire life in ways that travel when s/he's older will not.

Most teens who come back from such an experience will have different priorities about their future. This, she argues, is a feature, not a bug, although it's often the thing that scares parents most. The tiny world of high school seems so limited after you've spent a year managing on your own in another country, in another language. It was in Germany that I decided I wanted to graduate early; when I came back home I heaped on the correspondence classes in order to make that happen. Apparently I'm not alone. Her book is filled with stories from other high school exchange students who've had the same experience of wanting to get high school over and done with as soon as possible — or who simply decided not to come home at all. This possibility terrifies most parents, but again she argues it's a positive. The world needs global citizens, and the flexibility and language skills acquired abroad are more useful in the long run than staying on the regular high school track would be. She advises teens not to worry about having the typical four-year college experience and to just pick up as many college credits as they can through a combination of CLEP tests, community college and correspondence courses, and foreign language programs abroad. Transfer the whole lot to any affordable college, spend a year or two there, and you'll have a BA by the time you're twenty or so. It doesn't matter if it's a name-brand university; what matters is that you're fluent in Spanish or Swahili, you have no debt, you're young, and that you know how to travel the world.

Predictably, most of the criticism she's gotten focuses on class. "This is a rich white kid thing," she's told. She (and her husband, who seems to be the primary breadwinner) argue that actually it's cheaper than the regular high school-to-college track. A Rotary program might cost a couple thousand dollars, which is cheaper than having your sixteen-year-old live with you in your own home for a year; after all, they're being fed by some family in Paris. And colleges abroad are usually cheaper than their American counterparts, since most countries subsidize higher education.

I feel strongly both ways. Frost's audience is the suburban family for whom college is a non-optional expectation. She tells them to get out of the rat race and quit worrying about AP classes and SAT scores, to not be so overprotective of their children, and to teach them the virtue of getting by on less. She's clearly not thinking about the kids who know all about getting by on less, who live in dangerous neighborhoods where children being "overprotected" is the least of their parents' worries, who don't stress about AP classes because their school doesn't offer any, who will have to fight to get a high school diploma at all because the teaching they receive is so ineffective, or who have disabilities that can't or wouldn't be managed by an unrelated family in a foreign country. When she says parents can save tens of thousands of dollars on their children's educations she's assuming they have college savings or will be contributing to their kids' educations out of pocket, but five or ten thousand dollars isn't "cheap" if your starting expectation was zero. And when she says it's less expensive to send your child abroad than to have him/her live at home, she's assuming your child doesn't contribute anything to the household, like income from a part-time job that goes towards the utility bill, or unpaid care for younger siblings. Most of all she's assuming that duh, of course your kid is going to college somewhere: it's just a question of where and how. The better part of her book is about dealing with criticism from people who will think you're crazy for sending your kids abroad and letting them miss rites of passage like prom. But for a lot of families, that's the least of their worries.

She also assumes that your kids will be competing with other monolingual white American kids, and won't they be lucky to have this global advantage? Absent are the kids who are already bilingual, by virtue of growing up in an immigrant family. She constructs many hypothetical situations in which your global child is favored in a job interview over Jessie and Steve, who've only been to England, but in my experience the real competition is Noriko, who speaks Japanese without an accent. On the surface this may seem like an argument for pushing a global view even harder — after all, other countries have much greater facility with giving their students a multilingual education, and the world is increasingly transnational — but underneath it there needs to be a discussion of white/American-born privilege. If Ben who spent two years in France is getting a job over Emmanuel whose family is from Haiti, well, what's going on with that? Did Ben really get his job because he's "a global citizen," or is there a little bit more to it? Would Emmanuel's summer working on a farm abroad really look the same on a college application as Ben's summer doing the same? Are we allowed to talk about that? Or are we just supposed to celebrate Ben's ability to order a meal in a Romance language?

All that said, I appreciate that she's taking a machete to the view that traveling abroad is reserved for the children of the elite. Although more than half of graduating high school seniors say they plan to study abroad, very few of them actually do, because they look at the price tag for these programs and assume they're out of the question. One of the things she hammers home is that "official" study abroad programs are far more expensive than organizing one's own travel — what she calls "indie" programs — because when you go with a study abroad program you are paying the university fees at your home institution, too. She advises students to enroll directly in foreign schools.

This is what I did as a college junior at The American University in Cairo, and I was shocked to learn that some American students had spent an extra ten or twenty thousand dollars for the exact same credits I was earning. I also learned that there were even cheaper options I hadn't known about. Later, in grad school, I went back to Egypt and arranged independent study credit for research I was doing and for taking Arabic language classes at a private language school. This cost even less than AUC, which was already cheaper than most American colleges. And Egypt, like most countries, had a lower cost of living compared to the United States. Here she is absolutely correct: getting most or all of one's college education in another country is potentially far cheaper than entering the American system of higher education, where even public universities charge tuition.

Unfortunately, Frost's book is mainly concerned with convincing you that this is a viable option. That's great, but what would have been more helpful would have been lists, lists, and more lists of universities abroad, high school correspondence options, short-term study options, foreign language schools, work abroad programs, Peace Corps alternatives, and tips for funding it all. Luckily this information is available online for the dedicated student who is willing to search for it, but it'll be nice when it moves into the realm of common knowledge, when parents, teachers, and guidance counselors stop telling kids there is only one — monolingual, monocultural — path into adulthood. Frost's book is a start.

Via anti-racist parent:

Minnesota is home to the largest population of Korean-American adoptees in the country. MPR News wants to know what the 2012 end of international adoptions from South Korea means for these Minnesotans and their communities. Is this a victory? A defeat? Bittersweet? Are you expecting a change in your own community or its identity?

Respond

Last Friday I met K’s cousins, Omar (3) and Laila (5), the children of X’s sister. They’re growing up in Colorado, but come to Egypt in the summers to keep up their Arabic. K’s never met them, and unfortunately will miss them this year, too, because they’re going back to the U.S. at the end of the month and she’s not coming to Cairo until mid-August. They are adorable children. Energetic, amusing, and astonishingly well-behaved, even at times when they’d have every excuse not to be.

These pictures were taken in X’s mom’s apartment in Heliopolis.

This is Omar’s bubby. You can’t tell from the photo, but it barks. Incessantly. It’s supposed to walk, too, but that bit broke. This doesn’t stop Omar from putting it on a leash and shouting ta’ala! (come on!) at it. May Allah reward him for his efforts.

Can I take a moment and gush about my new camera? I’m still learning landscapes, but for close-up portraits I love it. This was taken one-handed while she was sitting on my lap and I was holding the cards in my other hand, auto-focus, auto-flash, no editing afterwards. It might be the best picture I’ve ever taken.

Playing with (and occasionally abusing) their auntie, X’s youngest sister:

Their parents debated about where to raise them. They were born in the U.S., but their mother (X’s sister) originally wanted them to grow up here in Egypt. They transferred back to Cairo, but Omar kept getting sick, so they transferred to the U.S. again. After a few years they started to talk, and she realized they were playing together in English. So, their baba stayed in the U.S. this summer, and she took the children back to Egypt for a few months so they will keep speaking Arabic.

It's hard, she said, in the U.S., because the only language schools are on weekends, and no one takes them seriously. "I always compare their education to mine," she said. She and X and their sisters went to French language schools in Egypt and Kuwait, became fluent in Arabic at home and on the street, and picked up English because everyone does. There are a few schools in the States that provide that kind of education, but they're mostly for diplomats' kids, they're rare, they're private, and they're expensive. Coming back to Egypt for extended trips is kind of a pain, but she doesn't want them to grow up monolingual.

She also, as she put it, “wanted them to get used to seeing the zebel boy” while they were still young. Cairo’s zebeleen are the city trash collectors. All Christians — in part because it’s nasty work and they are the oppressed minority here; in part because the work relies on pigs to sift through trash — they collect garbage from every apartment in the city and take it back to the Moqattam, a hill on the edge of Cairo, where they pick through it for valuables. Cairo has tried to replace them with a more modern sanitation system, but that would be expensive, would rob many many people of their livelihood, would take money out of Egypt and put it into foreign companies, and in the end wouldn’t be as efficient. (The zebeleen fought hard against a proposed recycling program a few years ago, because once people start separating their cans from their bottles they might realize that whoops! that’s where my wedding ring went!)

Obviously this is really dirty work, and the people who do it are, too. X told me that when he was a child he was told not to touch the railings in his apartment building because the zebel boy had touched them. When his sister says she wants her children to see this, she’s talking about a whole range of things: the poverty on the streets, the waiting in line for every little thing, the heat and traffic and noise and cars held together by scraps of wire and all the other evidence of grime and human suffering that is hidden from view in American suburbs. We were both worried that K., at fourteen, is already old enough that she’ll be annoyed at these things, hate Egypt, and won’t want to come back.

But there are trade-offs. I told her I enjoyed being here when K. was little because Egypt was so friendly to children, and she said oh really? because her experience was just the opposite. We compared stories and decided maybe the key factor was being a foreigner. In Egypt I was the American mother and everyone wanted me to have a good experience here, welcome to Egypt! your daughter is beautiful! but she’s just seen as another Egyptian mom. In the U.S., however, the reverse is true, for both of us.

Also, in the U.S., she’s able to control everything her children are exposed to. This is funny to me, because so many U.S. Muslims, including native-born American Muslims, complain that the U.S. is a den of sin and vice and it is hard to bring up good Muslim children in Gomorrah. For her, however, the U.S. is a country where you can put parental controls on the television (“not like Egypt, where they can look at anything”), the food in all the restaurants is clean, and you can enroll them in clubs and classes where everything is well-organized and you know the people they’ll be seeing there. And the only Arabic they hear is the Arabic their parents decide to use. Yesterday she told Laila not to do something and Laila came back with why she was going to do it anyway and then flipped her hand up, in a classic Egyptian hand gesture, and said “fi eh?” Literally it means “is what?” but its meaning is a sarcastic “what’s the issue?” or “do you have a problem with that?” I burst out laughing and Laila ran off and her mother said, “See, this is the kind of thing she hears here.” The other day, she said, her son called someone the son of a dog.

It’s interesting to hear this perspective because I come from the opposite place. One of the things I first loved about Egypt, and one of the reasons I initially wanted to raise my children here, was that it wasn’t sanitized like the U.S. is. Children are out at all hours, in every public space, exposed to everything that adults see. I thought that was healthy, and a nice alternative to what I saw as the hypocrisy of so many American parents, who live one kind of life in front of their children and another one once the kids are asleep or at the babysitter’s. But I can also see the appeal of having precision control over the way you parent, especially if you’ve grown up without that.

Muah. K's dad is buying her a plane ticket and he just called me and asked how to spell her name. Including her last name, which is also his last name.

He needed to double-check that the version he uses is the one that matches her birth certificate.

Coincidentally, yesterday I found a good piece from 2002 about the trouble with Romanizing the Arabic alphabet. The author has a good web site, too.

A couple weeks ago I sent Bee Lavender a link that someone had posted, Raising Yousuf: a diary of a mother under occupation. The Hip Mama people contacted the author, and her piece about breastfeeding under occupation is now up on their web site. Go read!

I was mentioning to someone yesterday how much time I spent in church as a kid. I think he was startled: first by the sheer number of hours I logged there, and second because I know so little about Christian history. You'd think there would be a contradiction there, no?

So now I'm trying to remember just what we did all that time in church. I know we sang, a lot, the same children's songs over and over again. We said the Lord's prayer. We put on a play about Noah's Ark once in third grade, and did nativity scenes every Christmas. We visited the nursing home every couple months, and wrote letters to members of the church who were in the hospital. We decorated the church for holidays. We colored pictures of Jesus. We gave out Christmas trees to "poor" families ("poor" in quotes, because it was a small working-class town without much wealth disparity, so the "privilege" we're talking about was there by a pretty slim margin). We collected canned goods. We took turns handing out communion wine and lighting the candles on the altar. We learned little stories — Noah's ark, Moses, Adam and Eve, Jesus's birth — but never discussed them except in the most obvious terms: love is better than hate, being good is better than being bad, freedom is better than slavery. We said prayers for sick people. We made crafty items for our parents out of glue and yarn.

In short, it was a service agency. Not a religious education. I'm not sure I have a problem with this — I'm just calling it what it is.

By junior high it became a sort of extended guidance counseling session. We talked about our friends and the tyranny of popularity and our relationship with our parents, what we wanted to be when we grew up, and all the Big Issues of '80s like suicide and AIDS. That sounds nice, doesn't it? I remember it as excruciating. Being forced to discuss matters this private with a community I had not chosen was hell on earth.

And again, not a religious education.

The mosques in this area have an entirely different view toward children. There's no singing, period; a lot less art and a lot more rote memorization of Qur'anic verses and the Arabic alphabet. I don't like this approach, either. The Arabic I like in theory, but in practice it favors the kids who speak it at home and ends up alienating those for whom it's a second or third language. And memorizing the Qur'an in Arabic without learning the translation and without discussing the meaning is something I've never understood. What's the point? I know it's beautiful to listen to a child say a surah, but to them it's just the babbling of nonsense words until they sort out the meaning and the context.

I don't have any better ideas. Just something I'm thinking about today.

Myths Over Miami: Folklorists record homeless children's beliefs about God.

On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an audacious demon attack — a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell.

…

All the Miami shelter children who participated in this story were passionate in defending this myth. It is the most necessary fiction of the hopelessly abandoned — that somewhere a distant, honorable troop is risking everything to come to the rescue, and that somehow your bravery counts.

…

Research by Harvard's Robert Coles indicates that children in crisis — with a deathly ill parent or living in poverty — often view God as a kind, empyrean doctor too swamped with emergencies to help. But homeless children are in straits so dire they see God as having simply disappeared. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam embrace the premise that good will triumph over evil in the end; in that respect, shelter tales are more bleakly sophisticated. "One thing I don't believe," says a seven-year-old who attends shelter chapels regularly, "is Judgment Day." Not one child could imagine a God with the strength to force evildoers to face some final reckoning. Yet even though they feel that wickedness may prevail, they want to be on the side of the angels.

Once? In Dakhla, X and I met a 9-year-old girl by the side of the road who was so striking that he dared risk the Evil Eye and told the girl's family she was beautiful. "Come back this afternoon for tea," they said. "We'll have her ready for you."

They knew he was already married. In fact that's all they knew about him. But he was from Cairo, a man with means enough to travel, and they must have recognized his compliment as an opportunity. So she'd be a child bride, the second wife to a stranger, but the link to the city would be solidified and the dowry would be enormous.

He agreed to the meeting and then we laid low in another part of town for a day or two, as was right and proper. He couldn't cast doubt on their intentions with their own daughter. His "she's much too young" would be interpreted as "she's beautiful but not beautiful enough to marry"; his "I don't believe in polygamy" would become "I won't share my good fortune with a family such as yours." Better to let them think he'd been unavoidably detained than to reject the proposal outright.

I can still picture her in her long red dress. The age my daughter is now.

The little girl with big black eyes who could have been my co-wife.