The first sight that greets students entering the spacious entrance hall of the Taipei American School (TAS) is an impressive display of fifty-two flags hanging from the second-floor balcony. These variegated colors are a reminder of the diversity of nationalities that make up the student body at TAS, which opened in 1949 to meet the needs of expatriate families from the United States and other foreign countries. The students passing under the flags offer just as colorful a display, with skin and hair of all shades and trendy fashions of every sort. It's a far different picture from the homogenous crowds that can be seen swarming into Taipei's local junior high and high schools, where nearly all students sport short dark hair, wear drab uniforms, and carry heavy canvas schoolbags.
The facilities at TAS are also more impressive than at nearly any local school. The four-story complex of modem buildings covered with brick-like tile looks as though it was uprooted from an upscale American suburb and transplanted in Tienmu, north of Taipei. The school has a total floor space of 44,000 square meters, and all classrooms are air-conditioned. Students have access to computer rooms and science laboratories. A library for the kindergarten and primary school holds 45,000 volumes, another for junior and senior high students has 60,000 books and subscribes to more than three hundred periodicals. Its audio-visual library contains five thousand videotapes, laser discs, and filmstrips.
TAS offers far better facilities than most local public schools, including three gyms, an indoor pool, several libraries and air-conditioned classrooms.
To help round out the students' physical development, there are three large gymnasiums, an indoor swimming pool, basketball and tennis courts. Outside, there is a football field, track, and a well-equipped playground for elementary school kids. Artistic talents are nurtured with music rooms and an auditorium with high-quality acoustics. Even the cafeteria and snack-bar food are something to boast about.
Well-qualified teachers are another TAS plus. According to Middle School Principal Catherine Funk, many of the teachers at the school have master's degrees and some have doctorates. While most teachers are from the United States, they generally have long-term teaching experience at international schools around the world.
Considering the quality environment and teaching staff, it's no wonder many Taiwan parents want to send their children to TAS rather than to a local public school. The school is a particularly popular choice for families that have spent time in the United States or Canada. Although they are usually entitled to a local public school education, the children in such families can also apply for admission to TAS if they hold a foreign passport – in this case often obtained by being born overseas. And when they get on campus, they will blend right in because more than 60 percent of the 2,300 TAS students are ethnic Chinese.
Many Chinese students who have spent time abroad find it difficult to return to the rigors of a local school. TAS provides an alternative with less pressure and smaller classes.
There are other choices for parents wanting their children to have a Western-style education, including the European School, which caters to British, French, and German expatriates, and the church-affiliated Dominican School and missionary-oriented Morrison Academy. But the most popular foreign school is TAS. With an increasing number of Taiwan expatriates returning home every year, the number of Chinese students at TAS has grown as well. Many of these children find it difficult to adapt to the public school system after having attended school in the West, and their parents also have come to prefer Western teaching methods.
But for many of these parents, their thinking is not much different from local Chinese parents: they want their children to excel academically, to speak good English, and, above all, to attend good colleges. And TAS has a reputation as an excellent college-prep school. A high percentage of its graduates go on to attend the best American universities.
When eight-year-old Allen Lee (李尚紘) returned from the United States with his parents last year, he spent one month at a public school before transferring to TAS. As his mother, Chang Tuan-tuan (張端端), explains, “Allen has a limited Chinese vocabulary, so his learning was hindered. Besides, he's accustomed to American-style teaching, which puts more emphasis on encouragement than punishment. He would burst into tears when the teacher scolded him, and he would shiver when the teacher hit the floor with a baton to keep the class in order. He hated going to school.” When Allen, now in second grade, is asked if he likes his new school, he can't conceal his joy. “TAS,” he yells, “is much more fun” than his previous school.
May Ho Gu (顧何美頤), chairwoman of the Education Committee of the TAS Board, sent her seven-year-old daughter directly to TAS when she returned to Taiwan in 1992, after a six-year stay in Canada. The girl was very shy, and Gu feared that at a public school she wouldn't have a chance to develop her personality. “Now she's like a blossoming flower,” Gu says. “She's become very open and vivacious. She's brave enough to express her own opinions and eager to make friends.”
Gu also didn't want her daughter to endure the same experience she went through in the Taiwan school system, with its high-pressure emphasis on rote memorization and endless test-taking. She finds that TAS teachers never put unhealthy pressure on students to learn, but encourage them to explore their own potential and to develop self-discipline. “The homework at local schools emphasizes repetition exercises,” she says. “Assignments at TAS are mostly project-oriented.” She recalls one assignment in which the class worked together on compiling their own guidebook to American cities, with each student choosing one city and finding information and pictures.
Gu believes that TAS also has a more democratic and effective way of maintaining order. “Instead of just imposing discipline on the students, the teacher discusses the rules with the class,” she says. “The students obey the rules voluntarily since they are involved in setting them. The students at local schools behave well in front of the teacher, but when the teacher turns around, the whole class turns into a mess.”
A Western-style education leaves less time for learning Chinese, although language classes are offered as an elective.
It helps, of course, that classes at TAS are smaller than at most local schools. Compared with the typical forty, and sometimes fifty, students in a public primary school classroom, the TAS Lower School keeps its classes down to eighteen to twenty-two students each. “This allows us to personalize our instruction, and to know exactly what problems the children are struggling with,” says Lower School Principal Mark Ulfers.
In order to minimize academic pressure and the competition among its primary students, TAS also follows a simple grading system for the first four grades, using only + (excellent), √(satisfactory), and N (needs to improve). Students are evaluated on their performance in four core subjects (language arts, math, science, and social studies) as well as on work habits. May Gu prefers this system because it looks not only at the students' achievement, but also takes into account their efforts. Even the more traditional A-to-F grading system that is introduced in fifth grade is less pressure-oriented than the 0-100 evaluation and specific class rank that is assigned to students in public schools.
The curriculum and class schedule are also much more flexible than in the Taiwan school system. While TAS students take what are called core courses, including language arts, math, science, and social studies, these are taught according to the principle of “integrated study.” As Ulfers explains, “When you teach a science subject, you try to include some mathematics activities, and you also include writing ability and some social study. Everything is thus integrated into learning.” For middle school students, the coursework is even more varied. Besides the required classes of language arts, social studies, science, math, music, physical education, and computer literacy, students can choose from a variety of electives, including foreign languages, home economics, woodshop, and journalism.
Many parents feel that the TAS curriculum offers a healthy mixture of academic and non-academic subjects, whereas the emphasis at local schools is on learning only what will help students pass the all-important high school entrance examination. “TAS aims at balanced development,” Gu says. At some public schools, she complains, a teacher might skip a scheduled physical education or art class and replace it with Mandarin or math – something that would never happen at TAS. Lower school students regularly attend three hours of PE a week, and middle school students have forty-five minutes a day.
The homework load is also lighter, one aspect of a TAS education that many Chinese parents cannot get used to. “Every time I go to a parent-teacher meeting, I hear many Taiwan parents asking the teachers to give more assignments,” says Chang Tuan-tuan, who has three children attending TAS. But Chang finds that the workload at TAS is much heavier than at the public school her daughter attended in the United States. “The academic standards here are very high,” she says. “Most of the parents want to send their children to first-class universities in the States.”
American universities are looking for students with the kind of balanced educational background that TAS offers – unlike local universities, for which admission is based only on a student's entrance-exam score. Extracurricular activities are also an important consideration for college admissions in the United States, and TAS students are encouraged to develop interests outside of school.
While a high proportion of local junior and senior high students spend their evenings at cram schools (see story on page 18) – and some Chinese parents at TAS still send their children to extra math or Mandarin classes – most TAS students participate in sports or join art, music, film, or computer clubs after school. The Taipei Youth Program Association, which shares TAS facilities, offers a wide range of after-school recreational and sports programs.
School hours are also set up to give students more time for outside activities. Lower school students go to school from 8:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. five days a week, while public school primary students must be on campus before 7:30 a.m. and leave at 3:30 p.m., plus attend for half a day on Saturdays. TAS middle school students are at school from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., whereas local junior high students generally are not finished with classes until 5:30 p.m.
Local Chinese with foreign passports can also apply to attend Taipei's European School. As at TAS, the schedule allows more time than at local schools for music, art, and physical education.
There is, however, a downside for Chinese students attending TAS. For one thing, they are getting a largely American-oriented education and thus may be losing out on learning about their own cultural heritage. The school does make some effort to accommodate its Chinese students in this regard. “As all. international school, we are obligated to fashion our curriculum after some of the needs of the international population,” Ulfers says. For example, Mandarin is part of the curriculum, but it is limited to required courses in listening and speaking ability from kindergarten to second grade, and all. optional program for higher grades. While junior high and high school students can take Mandarin as an in-school elective, for third-to fifth-graders, the optional program is available only after regular school hours.
In response to parent requests, the school has also introduced lessons on Asia in its history courses. “Starting in ninth grade, students are taught Eastern thinking, literature, and history,” says May Gu, head of the Education Committee, which spearheaded this addition to the curriculum. The program includes inviting students from Asian countries to deliver oral presentations during class.
Still, Chinese language and history are given only minor roles at TAS, and many Chinese students do not have adequate language skills to comprehend local TV programs or to read Chinese newspapers. It can be difficult for them to get along in mainstream Taiwan society or even to join in activities with other relatives that live here. Twelve-year-old Andrew Lee (no relation to Allen Lee) feels left out at the local math cram school that he attends two evenings a week. “They know how to have fun with each other,” he says, “but they don't play with me.” And even though Andrew's local cousins live nearby, they rarely get together. “They always have a lot of homework,” he says. “When we meet, we just say hello.”
Lee Wen-lin (李文琳) also feels it is a pity that his son Allen and his other two children studying at TAS cannot read Chinese as well as children at public schools. “The Chinese programs offered at TAS are too simple. My wife and I were thinking of hiring a private tutor, but we gave up the idea because they already have their other homework to do. It's difficult to arrange a schedule for three kids to learn Chinese.” Their mother does her best to teach the children Chinese at home, using the standard textbooks from local elementary schools, and she even sent them to Chinese classes during their vacation this summer to the United States.
Another downside to TAS is the cost. Supporting such good facilities and well-qualified teachers doesn't come cheap, and the school receives virtually no U.S. government funding. It depends mainly on tuition fees and donations. Annual tuition is US$7,900 for the lower school and US$10,000 for middle school and high school, plus a yearly registration fee of US$925 and US$100 for miscellaneous fees.
Even if Chinese parents can afford the tuition, it is not always easy for their children to get in to TAS. Families must qualify, at least technically, as expatriate families. The student must hold a U.S. or other foreign passport and a valid ROC visa. According to TAS mother Chang Tuan-tuan, even meeting this requirement is not always enough. The school has recently become stricter in its admission policies, giving priority to children whose parents also have foreign passports. “The more foreign passports a family has, the better chance their children have of being enrolled,” she says. “In addition, the student's English and previous academic achievement are also taken into consideration.”
Despite the high cost and restrictive admissions, many Chinese parents will continue to do whatever they can to get their children into TAS, as well as to the other foreign schools in Taiwan. Lisa Deng (鄧麗珊), who sends her three boys to the Morrison Academy, says, “The Taiwan education system leaves no room for a child's self-development. I'm not the kind of mother who takes her children's academic work extremely seriously. What I care about is that the school helps my children cultivate their own abilities to judge and create.”