Cathy and I recently learned Nathan did not make the cut of Grace Christian’s pre-school. Needless to say, we were very upset, and to say I was furious would be the understatement of the year.

Now, Cathy’s family has a history of education at Grace Christian. All her siblings and she attended that school. Nathan’s two cousins attend school there. If for only that loyalty and the fact their campus is five minutes away from our home, we decided to send our son there. We then learned that there would be an interview to cost a non-refundable P500 to determine if Nathan could meet their standards.

My son is a brilliant, sociable, friendly, three-year-old boy with an immense ability to adapt to new environments and people. He knows his numbers, his alphabet, his shapes. We were both confident he would ace this ‘interview.’

Well, apparently, he didn’t. I have some salient points:

We question the assessment process of Grace Christian School. We paid P500 for Nathan to undergo a ten-minute ‘interview’ in which the interviewer called my son ‘hyperactive.’ How could she arrive at that conclusion in ten minutes? He is a three-year-old boy in a new environment. Some children, including my son, will naturally tend to explore; others will cry or throw tantrums; others will sit stoically. How can you conclude my son is ‘hyperactive’ based on a brief ten-minute interview?

She also scored Nathan “0″ in his orals. For heaven’s sake! My son won’t stop talking, and he can verbalize his thoughts clearly enough. While studies have shown that first-born children tend to develop oral communication skills a little slower than others for lack of socialization, Nathan does not have the benefit of interaction with other children, save for the kids at Sunday school once a week. Was he rejected therefore because there are times when he can’t pronounce his name correctly, saying “Pi-tan” instead of “Nathan”? What would they prefer, I rename my child “John” or “Bob”?

There are two points to be taken into consideration here. First is, exactly what kind of student is Grace Christian looking for? With a 40-1 student-to-teacher ratio, I imagine they may look at my son as a potential trouble child because he’d been labelled hyperactive. I imagine they’re probably looking for a stoic child who’d rather sit still. Well, excuse me, Nathan does sit still! His attention span is tremendous, and he spends a good amount of time seated, playing with clay, reading his books, playing with his kiddie laptop.

You put a child in a new environment, you expect that child to react according to his instinct. Nathan’s instinct is to discover the area, familiarize himself with it. His first word when he entered Grace’s interview room was “Nice!” He then spent the next few minutes sitting on chairs, calling out the color of each chair as he sat on it. “Blue!” he’d beam, then transfer to another, on which he would say, “yellow!”

Apparently, this type of pro-active pre-school student does not appeal to Grace Christian School.

Second, what kind of knowledge do they expect of a three-year-old? They did not ask Nathan about the alphabet, they did not ask him numbers, they did not ask him colors. Instead, they asked him to name some shapes, all of which he named correctly save for a “semi-circle,” a shape I seriously doubt most children his age are familiar with. He was also asked questions about ’same’ and different.’ While I acknowledge that some kids are familiar with this concept, I think it terribly closed-minded to assume that a child who does not know certain concepts should not be admitted.

A third point: why does Grace Christian use a points system in evaluating their applicants? Not that it’s really any of our business, but shouldn’t there be some kind of assessment that goes into the black-and-white eventualities that come with a points system used for assessment? Every child is different, and to assign points to a child who has never been to school smacks of rigid totalitarianism that leaves a bitter taste in a parent’s mouth.

I can understand if the assessment resulted from a significant amount of time spent with the child, engaging him in conversation, observing him by giving him an activity that would mirror what they would actually do in school. Instead, the assessment is ten minutes, and they labelled my son a hyperactive child simply because he stood up a couple of times during the conversation, in a colorful room that floods my son with attractive visual stimuli?

We question Grace Christian’s manner of informing parents of their children’s results. The supervisor would not grant my wife a face-to-face to discuss the results. So instead, Cathy had to listen to a total stranger tell her why her son did not measure up to par, and all logical points my wife may have had to the contrary were not given attention, partly because my wife was not there in person to assert herself.

Is it even ethical to ‘reject’ a child wishing to enter nursery? Why on earth would a school reject a child entering nursery? They actually told Cathy, we could try again in March, and if our son shows even a ‘little improvement,’ they may take him in.

A little improvement?! What is there for my son to improve on? To learn the concepts that this school considers a pre-requisite for acceptance into their traditional Fil-Chinese education? That we have to teach him what a semi-circle is, what the difference between same and different is?

If this is what Grace Christian thinks is important, and my son’s brilliance in other matters, from his computer skills to his clay creativity to his affinity for crayons to his proclivity for ‘cooking play time’ are not important to them, well, fine. You don’t deserve my son.

I realize I may sound bitter. Parents are more likely to take offense at the ‘rejection’ of their child when entering nursery because it more often than not is taken as an indication of how well they raised the child. We raised our son to be a creative, God-fearing, people-respecting boy. He greets visitors to our home, always says “please,” “thank you,” and “sorry” without having to be prompted, and has a thirst for knowledge and new experiences.

As far as Cathy and I are concerned, we are very determined to make sure that Nathan’s first educational experiences are fun, positive ones. Knowing there are other Filipino-Chinese schools in the area that lean more towards wholistic development (see a good list of Filipino pre-schools here), we’ve decided to seek out a school that offers a curriculum leaning towards multiple intelligences and wholistic development. In retrospect, we see Grace Christian does not offer what we are seeking, because apparently, they are seeking round pegs for their traditional round-hole educational system. Nathan would get swallowed up in that system (especially with a 40-1 kid ratio!), and his creativity and individuality are almost sure to be deadened in a school with a traditional, uber-rigid assessment system.
We intend to visit the school again sometime next week to ask for Nathan’s pictures back, because they are expensive. Mark my words, if they intend to hold on to those pictures for ‘records-keeping sake,’ I may just go ballistic. Why would a school hold onto the records of a student who they don’t even accept? Oi vey.

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