Originally Posted by Oink

Everyone wants the best for their kids, it just education in the UK plays such an important role in social class formation and identity, that they’ve learnt the type of school a child attends is important for future ‘success’. There’s a reason the upper classes fork out out thousands of pounds in schools fees, or the middle classes buy homes in certain catchment areas, they feel its an investment. The lack of intensity and competition within and between schools here, I believe makes UK expats feel the quality of instruction is somehow lacking. Schooling in Canada, apart from the obvious, plays a different role in society. Public education by its nature is a conservative institution, it instills the values of the wider culture. Thus here, it’s far more about turning children of immigrants into some unified and thus compliment version of what it is to be a Canadian. If a child is going to grow up here and live here as an adult, there is nothing, ceteris paribus, wrong with putting them in the system of a major Canadian school district.

Originally Posted by Hawk13

In Canada, the only moving to get into a different catchment area would be for your kid to play for a better hockey team

Originally Posted by dbd33

My corporate lawyer sent his children to UCC (and the girl's version, the name of which I've forgotten). At the time he said he did it so they'd have good contacts. I suspect it worked, they went to the US for undergrad on tennis scholarships, studied nothing, and then went to law schools in Canada.

I queued all night to get one of my children into what was then considered the better school in the area, no one else in the queue was English so the competitive view of education isn't an exclusively ethnic one.

In the event, she didn't go there but to a snobbier, though state funded, school where the students were specifically coached in the manners of the better people in Canada; where there were penalties for speaking with the accent, or manner of expression, of oiks. The board in the hall listing last year's graduates in order of scholarship money raised suggested to me that the school was not about woolly ideas of forming a Canadian culture (ha, talk about flogging a dead horse!) but about winning at school. That's what we, the vicariously living parents, wanted.

I understand that education is Oink's business and cannot tell how far his tongue is in cheek above but my experience is not that Canadian schools are equal and children blissfully bumble along. It is that the parents pay through the nose for a house on the west side of Vic Park so as be in the Toronto, and not Scarboro, school district and that their children are bent over the books at the convenience store counter late into the night. Their parents aint come here for the scenery, they're here for a better life for their kids and the kids are damn well going to get it by trampling over everyone else's.

Originally Posted by ExKiwilass

Maybe that's the difference between BC and Ontario.

Originally Posted by dbd33

Perhaps. It may well be that BC is free from academic competition, a place where a culture of contentment is fostered by the equality of wealth of the inhabitants.

Originally Posted by ExKiwilass

Maybe that's the difference between BC and Ontario.

I know a grad of the girl's version of UCC. Again, not setting the world on fire and currently she's working in a call centre as a phone slavey.

She's lovely though

Originally Posted by ExKiwilass

Now you're being silly

Originally Posted by dbd33

Granted, but oink started it with this:

the main reason public education has a different cadence and intensity in Canada, is that unlike the UK, that they don’t primarily use education to drive social class distinctions and identities

I think people in Canada do use education to drive social class distinctions both deliberately on the part of the parents (private schools, choice of house location) and less deliberately on the part of the children (speaking primarily English or French, adopting western styles of dress and mannerisms). This may be less true of cradles but they're a minority here (the GTA) and will be of declining importance in the future. The cadence of eductation here may be different from that in the UK but the intensity in Mississauaga is exactly that which one would find in Brent.

Originally Posted by ExKiwilass

Interesting. It does sound like things are different where you live. I haven't come across that level of intensity here. People do get a bit weird about French Immersion though.

My point was more that I don't see that in adulthood the school you went to makes a lot of difference - here anyway. Maybe it's different in Toronto.

Originally Posted by ExKiwilass

Interesting. It does sound like things are different where you live. I haven't come across that level of intensity here. People do get a bit weird about French Immersion though.

My point was more that I don't see that in adulthood the school you went to makes a lot of difference - here anyway. Maybe it's different in Toronto.

Originally Posted by dbd33

French immersion seems competitive, at least getting into FI seems competitive, most everywhere. Fortunately, we didn't have to deal with that.

I think the choice of high school does matter in the long term, not directly, but because it influences the options for university and there's certainly a snob value in the workplace regarding universities. I think this is largely true of the UK as well. Unless someone attended Eton, they're much more likely to trade on their university than their secondary school. (Assuming, of course, that they got into Oxbridge, had one attended Eton and Essex one would likely peddle the Eton aspect).

Parents of small children around me here, in a large office, prattle constantly about the rate of entry to the better universities from the various high schools. I can't imagine people anywhere are more obsessive about it.

Originally Posted by dbd33

I think the choice of high school does matter in the long term, not directly, but because it influences the options for university and there's certainly a snob value in the workplace regarding universities.

Originally Posted by ExKiwilass

Hilarious. That must put on a lot of pressure on you, the parents, I imagine.

Originally Posted by ExKiwilass

Hilarious. That must put on a lot of pressure on you, the parents, I imagine.

Originally Posted by ExKiwilass

I've never ever heard of that here. Again, don't see a snob value to unis here?

Originally Posted by Hawk13

Haven't found that the case here in BC, at least not in public schools. Private schools maybe different.

It based on your grades.