Hawaii's World
By A.A. Smyser
Tuesday, April 9, 1996
Each side agrees to pay the salary of its participant while they exchange schools for three months. It was conceived by Frank Boas, who retired here after a career as an attorney in Europe working on international projects. Its continuation may be left to our private schools because of DOE budget problems.
This year's visitor was Caroline Friend, an English citizen who teaches at the European School in Munich.
I asked her what surprises Hawaii held for her. Our attitude on race was No. 1. In Germany it can be considered rude to ask someone's racial background. Here everyone asks. Her students talked about their mixed ethnicity with pride - a tremendous openness, which she likes.
She called her 11th-grade Kamehameha English and composition students "the nicest group of young people I've ever had." They are enthusiastic and spontaneously delightful, she said. When she spent a day visiting Roosevelt High School she found the same qualities there.
Her Kamehameha students also followed strict codes of discipline and dress unthinkable in her European school where students wear almost anything including sloppy attire and rings in their ears. Unlike here, her European students over 16 are allowed to smoke in designated school areas.
Kamehameha students, she added, know it is a privilege to attend the school and know they can be dropped. No such strong threat hangs over her European students - other than that they have to be prepared to pass strong annual written and oral exams.
Hawaii schools, she notes, put much more emphasis on earning specific credits and, in her view, waste too much time on frequent tests. Almost all of her Kamehameha students are college bound. She thinks most of them will do well. Overall, a much smaller percentage of European students goes on to college than American students - a pattern that former University of Hawaii President Albert Simone thought we should seriously consider.
Friend was surprised to see European language programs being deemphasized at Kamehameha where the strong non-English language programs are Hawaiian and Japanese. The former, she noted, will never have much use outside Hawaii but helps build cultural pride.
She was strict in her English teaching, demanded "proper" English and found her students responded well to it. She is a teacher, she said, who believes in "teaching from the top" rather than emphasizing peer response, which is more common here and considered a part of Hawaiian culture. To me she sounded tough and demanding, which I applaud. Three years ago another European teacher visitor who taught in our public schools said we were doing our students a "disfavor" by not demanding enough of them.
Life in Hawaii, Friend said, has a much different balance than life in Europe, with less emphasis on theater and classical music. Our symphony and opera audiences, she noted after attending, are far less demanding than European audiences where boos are common. Maybe it is because winters make people spend more time indoors, she said. She found she really didn't miss the European balance while here.
On the other hand, she said, she can think of nothing back home in Europe to match the commitment to professionalism that her Kamehameha students gave to their hula training and competitions.
Different worlds.