Finding educational options for missionary children has been a challenge for a long time, perhaps as long as there have been missionaries with children. Earlier in the modern missionary movement, children were sometimes educated in boarding schools in their parents’ home country, rarely seeing their parents. This was the experience of Eric Liddell (starting at age six). To solve this distance problem, boarding schools were established in the country or region of parents’ service so that children could at least be somewhat near their parents and see them from time to time. Hudson Taylor’s school at Chefoo (Yantai) in China’s Shandong Province comes to mind as an early example.
In recent decades, homeschooling has become a widely used approach so that children can stay with their parents while young, perhaps going to a boarding school when older. More creative approaches now exist that enable students to study at home part of the time and study at a school part of the time (such as Modular School Group, https://msgeducation.com/). The relatively new Chinese mission movement has yet to benefit from some of the advances in missionary kid (MK) education. Moreover, Chinese MK’s face some specific challenges that make it especially hard. By sharing “a tale of three boys,” this article will attempt to illustrate these challenges and suggest some solutions. I will start with a personal story.
One MK’s Early Education: A Personal Story
In the summer of 1973, I found myself in a South Pacific island nation. My parents had come to be teachers at a boarding school for MK’s of a Western missionary organization. Missionaries who worked among remote unreached people groups sent their children to school at the mission’s central base. The kids went home three times a year to spend extended periods of time with their parents. The medium of instruction at the school was my heart language (English), and I interacted with my parents and friends in that same shared heart language. I learned a smattering of the local pidgin English, but that was not critical to the life I led. The school was affordable because it was staffed by missionaries like us who had financial support from their sending churches and friends.
In first grade, and then again in seventh and eighth grade, we returned to the US for a home assignment. I went to Stateside schools during those years, and the adjustment was not easy. That being said, my MK school also used an American curriculum, so from that aspect I was able to integrate seamlessly.
When I was in ninth grade, we moved to a West African country, and my parents continued to teach at a similar, though smaller, school for the children of missionaries. Our school was a registered SAT testing center even though the total enrollment was only 25 students. I didn’t worry much about going back to my home country for college; I was academically prepared in English, and my school records were understandable and acceptable by the university I entered. I earned a bachelor’s degree in math and science education and then entered the teaching profession myself.
Growing Up Between Languages: Jonathan’s Journey
My friend Jonathan (not an actual person, but similar to people I knew) grew up as the child of American missionaries in a creative access country. His city had few other Western foreigners, and his playmates were all speakers of the local language. He went to a local kindergarten and elementary school. His family spoke English in the home and read English books to him, including the Bible, and his mother taught him how to read and write in English. Jonathan experienced additive bilingualism, growing his home language and adding a new language as well (see https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48b1x975).
Jonathan was the oldest child in his family. As he approached the end of elementary school, his parents looked ahead to his future life and post-high-school education. They realized that he needed to begin studying his academics in English. There were several options: they could stay where they were and begin homeschooling him, move to another city where there was an English-medium school, or send him to an English-medium boarding school in another country. Since they had younger children who were doing just fine in the local system, they decided to homeschool him during his middle school years, then re-evaluate once he reached high school.
These plans were disrupted a year later when the whole family was deported. They returned to their home country and then moved to another country, choosing to live near a school where all the children in the family could study in English. It was a hard adjustment to be in a new school and a new place, but all the kids were able to catch up after two years, and all of them graduated from that school. Today, Jonathan can still speak the local language he learned as a child. His oldest sister can as well, but the two youngest siblings have forgotten it. He is attending an English-medium university in the US, and he hangs out with international students. He loves it when he has a chance to interact with people using his second language.
Caught Between Systems: David and the Chinese MK Dilemma
Finally, I turn to David, who is also not an actual person but represents a third category of students.
David’s parents are from China, and they moved to another closed country in Asia when David was three and his sister was seven. She had just completed first grade in a local public school, while David would have entered kindergarten that fall if they hadn’t left China. This meant that David’s sister had a student number, or 学籍, while David did not. For Chinese students, a student number is basically mandatory for entry or re-entry into the public system.
As they left China, David’s parents knew that they would need to earn their income in their destination country. This was necessary both because they needed a professional visa to enter this closed country, and because their sending church and friends were not able to provide them with sufficient funding to cover all living expenses. (It’s helpful to recall that per capita GDP in China was about $12,600 in 2023, while US per capita GDP for the same year was about $82,700, according to https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD )
When they arrived in their destination country, people spoke the national language in personal conversation, and many also spoke Russian for business. The best schools were also conducted in Russian. David’s parents had to make a decision about their children’s education. There was a Christian international school in the city where they lived with English-medium instruction. It was quite expensive. There was a secular, private Russian school that was high-quality and less expensive. There was a lower-quality school conducted in the local language. And there was home-schooling, but homeschooling resources were primarily available in English. For all four options, David’s parents faced the challenge of trying to support their children’s education in a language they themselves did not know.
In the end, they decided to send the children to a Russian-medium school, and the parents took on the task of teaching the children the Chinese language at home. They did so through speaking the language with the children and reading Chinese books with them. At the beginning, David’s mom also taught his sister to write Chinese characters. But the time needed for such an undertaking was overwhelming, and Chinese writing sessions often ended in tears on the part of both mother and daughter. They settled for teaching the kids how to recognize Chinese characters, not write them.
Meanwhile, the children’s Russian language was progressing nicely. Russian became their academic language, and over time, David and his sister spoke Russian to each other a lot at home when it was just the two of them. They were beginning to experience subtractive bilingualism, a phenomenon where a newly learned language begins to reduce the ability of the child to communicate in the first (home) language (see https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48b1x975).
As David’s sister prepared to enter seventh grade, her parents came to a decision. English language ability would open more doors to her for post-secondary education than Russian language ability. Little brother David continued in the local Russian school since it was cheaper, but his sister transferred to the Christian international school. It was a major financial sacrifice on the part of the parents, but they scraped their resources together and made it work.
After two years of this, a new hardline government took over, and most of the missionaries had to leave. David’s parents were no exception. They could not return to China, because it was basically impossible for the kids to re-enter the educational system there. Instead, they went to another country where their organization had an established presence.
David’s parents decided to use this opportunity to put both David and his sister in an English-medium private school. David was in seventh grade, and his sister was in eleventh grade. He knew conversational Chinese and academic Russian, and now he was studying in an English-medium school. As English began to “erase” his Russian, and Chinese remained a conversational language for him, he struggled academically. He had no language that he had really mastered. His sister was doing better because of her existing English background. His parents spent many late nights talking about post-secondary education for David and his sister. The Christian college education they desired for their children was typically very expensive, and typically in English. They knew that an English-medium college education was going to make it very hard for their kids to return to their home country to live. They also wondered at times whether their grandchildren were going to speak Chinese at all. Ultimately, David was able to attend a Christian English-medium college in Indonesia, while his sister went to college in Singapore.
Four Key Challenges Facing Chinese MKs
All missionary children inherit a legacy of living in a third culture and being home everywhere and nowhere at the same time. However, these three stories illustrate some unique challenges that Chinese MK’s face.
- First, there is no turning back. Leaving the Chinese educational system can often be a one-way street with no option to return if several years have passed. Lacking a student number and being several grade levels behind in Chinese makes it almost impossible.
- Second, learning a non-phonetic language is extra challenging. Learning the Chinese language, with its thousands of unique characters that mainland students spend 12 years memorizing, is challenging to do in a foreign environment where peers and schools do not use it, and where parents are not prepared to teach it. The twenty-six letters of the English language stand in stark contrast.
- Third, there is a dearth of home-language education resources in Chinese. Many Christian homeschooling resources are available in English, but far fewer exist in Chinese. This may lead to a situation where homeschooling students are studying in a language that the parents do not know. Christian post-secondary educational options are typically (though not exclusively) in English. This impacts the language and schooling chosen for high school. All of this puts a wall between parents and the education of their children.
- Fourth, mission from one closed country to another brings extra stress. Being a missionary sent from one closed country to another adds a completely new level of security risks. At risk of understatement, deportation for proselyting in a closed country will not lead to a hero’s welcome for Chinese missionaries as they return home.
Toward Solutions: What Can Be Done
Having shared some key challenges faced by Chinese families with MK education, it’s time to turn to some ideas that will hopefully spark more thinking and action in this space. One of the needs is further development of Christian homeschool materials, both for parents and students, in the Chinese language. Homeschool training for parents does exist in Chinese and needs to be revised with the Chinese missionary community in mind. There is a relative dearth of student educational materials.
Ideally, these are not English-language materials translated into Chinese, but rather educational materials developed in Chinese, by Chinese, for Chinese. At the very least, translated materials should be contextualized for their audience and digitized for safer, easier access (see https://www.equipme.cloud/ for an example). Given the lack of social acceptance of home schooling in China, and the lack of confidence and/or academic preparation to teach one’s children, these homeschooling materials need to provide comprehensive instructions for how to proceed, day by day. As parents gain further comfort with this model, they can implement their own supplementary materials as desired.
Bridges to Higher Education for Chinese MKs
Another significant need for Chinese MK’s is a set of bridges into post-secondary education. For sake of brevity, I will focus here on parents who want their child to attend an English-medium university. MK’s who are already attending English-medium international high schools or online schools need college options that are affordable. US-based Christian colleges are hard-pressed to offer a bachelor’s for less than US$25,000 per year. That is out of range for the typical Chinese MK. One way to reduce cost is to attend an English-medium university in Southeast Asia or Europe. Another is to take advantage of dual-enrollment courses during high school and potentially complete the first two years of university online before high school graduation, even if it means adding a year to the length of the typical high school experience.
For those without good options for in-person high school education, either due to price or availability, parents need ways to educate their children in subjects that they may never have taken themselves. One possible solution (for high school) would be for Chinese sending organizations to set up a school cooperative on the field with an educator (a combination of youth pastor and educational facilitator), who comes to the mission field to focus on the MK’s. This leader would teach the students Bible, community service, and personal discipleship in a face-to-face context at the school co-op location. The remainder of the courses would be online courses that are taken as a group, in a classroom, with supervision provided by parents. Students could earn an associate’s degree in this context, which would then remove the need for a high school diploma. Using that associate’s degree, they could apply for admission to a university to complete their bachelor’s degree in two more years. (Note: Crown College and Columbia International University are both providing dual credit courses that are suitable for the Chinese MK audience.)
Helping MKs Retain Chinese Language and Identity
A third need for Chinese MK’s is a way to help them retain their mother tongue and learn Chinese as an academic language. While their Chinese will almost certainly be less developed than that of peers who grew up in China, many of those same peers have forgotten a great deal of their Chinese language by the time they turn 30. Measuring a Chinese MK against that standard is more hopeful. How can they graduate from high school knowing the language, culture, and history of their country in a way expected of a Chinese adult?
Existing Christian international schools that are seeing an uptick of Chinese students should consider offering AP Chinese and HSK Chinese to high school students. If a Chinese MK can get high school credit for studying their home language, it can help provide the motivation that parents no longer can at home. But what about Chinese language, culture, and history (语文课) being taught as an integrated package from a Christian worldview? A school in an area with many Chinese MK’s could add a track that focuses on these classes. While students would not graduate with a Chinese proficiency level similar to mainland twelfth grade students, they would know the things that a Chinese adult should know. This school could offer those same Chinese language arts classes online to Chinese families that are scattered along the Silk Road as missionaries, and to Chinese business families in those same locations that may meet Jesus online while studying Chinese.
Beyond the Classroom: The Need for a Supportive Ecosystem
I recently spoke with Christian schools in Thailand and Indonesia that have tracks for Chinese students like those described above. They are serving populations that have recently exited the mainland. In addition to the school, there are other elements that should be considered. First, there needs to be a church (or churches) that are strategically included in the ecosystem for the spiritual development of the families that are coming for their children’s education. Second, there needs to be a purpose for the parents as well—perhaps seminary training, perhaps business opportunities, or other ways for them to engage. Having an ecosystem that provides engagement and challenge for the parents can help prevent the splitting of families (with dad back home earning the needed income). It may also help the schools serve as a launch pad for Chinese families to re-envision their next mission and not get “stuck” in the comfortable new environment of their child’s great school.
Why This Matters: A Strategic Call for the Global Church
Let’s circle back to David, the last of the three boys in this story, and his sister. One of the biggest challenges missionaries around the world face is the education of their children. This problem is exacerbated when missionaries go to remote locations that are not friendly to the gospel. And that is precisely where many of our Chinese brothers and sisters are going. They are part of a historic movement of Chinese missionaries going “back to Jerusalem.” Assisting this movement by helping these missionaries disciple their own children and thrive on the field is very strategic. This should be a priority for sending agencies and educational resource companies. Let us serve them as they go places that are beyond the reach of traditional sending countries and organizations.
