‘The best of both worlds’: Lagos private schools as engaged strategists of transnational child-raising

ABSTRACT

Schools in migrant-sending contexts often educate many children whose parents live abroad and decide to ‘leave’ or ‘send’ their children to be raised ‘back home’. Yet there has been little attention to how transnational child-raising is enacted by non-kin actors within educational institutions. This paper addresses this absence, exploring Lagos private schools as crucial sites of care for children with parents in the diaspora. Examining educators’ perspectives on schooling children ‘sent back’ to Nigeria from the UK and USA, the paper argues that they undertake intensive and strategic projects of transnational child-raising. They act as defacto guardians and position their educational offerings as highly moral in ways that draw on endogenous notions of ‘training’ good character, but are not driven by reproducing tradition. Rather, they play intermediary roles in transnational families: they aim to realise parents’ desires for respectful, disciplined children who excel academically, yet are also attuned to young people’s struggles. They are conscious of diaspora realities and understand their schools’ roles as portals facing both ways in the transnational social field, preparing young people for multiple possible futures. The paper demonstrates that exploring education as a site of social reproduction can be richly revealing of the dynamics of transnationalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• Nigeria
• transnational families
• transnational care
• migration

Acknowledgements

Foremost and sincere thanks to educators from the following institutions for the generosity with their time and insights: Bridge House College, Doregos Private Academy, Dowen College, Grace School, The Grange School, Greensprings, Effortswill Academy, Excel College, Imperial Lights College, Jextoban School, Lekki British School, Oxbridge Tutorial College, Phidel College, Queensland Academy, and Queen’s College. Many thanks also to Dr. Felix Akinnusi and the Ogunkolati family for the assistance in Lagos. Finally, thank you to Cati Coe for a great deal of advice and support.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 I am of mixed-race white and East Asian heritage, but am predominantly ‘read’ as white and have a middle-class habitus. So although I personally see myself as mixed-race, ‘white’ is the most accurate descriptor of how my intersectional class-race positioning predominantly functions to socially place me.

2 I obtained precise fees for many schools, however some schools (particularly at the top end) were more coy about specific figures, giving me rough indications which I supplemented with online research. The fluctuating value of the Naira also makes the figures approximate, as well as influencing the cost of ‘homeland’ education for diaspora parents.

3 The extent to which young people feel these familial bonds is debatable, but most of the young people in the research did discuss forging close relationships with certain teachers, often younger staff who were not their official mentors.

4 In the 12 contemporary cases in this study, 2 young people had been enthusiastic about schooling in Nigeria, 7 had accepted with ambivalence, and 3 had been tricked into their educational sojourn when already in-country for a ‘holiday’. In the retrospective cases, 6 were discussed, and 4 were ‘surprises’.

5 The complex outcomes of homeland education are hard to comprehensively assess. In this research, young people’s perspectives also spoke of some ‘success’ in that they mostly adapted relatively quickly and made positive meaning around their sojourns. However, my sampling and access pathways meant I was unlikely to come across difficult cases, though they were acknowledged and discussed by educators. For youth experiences in other contexts see Hoechner (2020a, 2020b), Abotsi (2020) and Lee (2016).

6 The complexity of this issue cannot be fully addressed here. However, the illegality of corporal punishment in western countries is disliked by many Nigerians who see it as state interference in the sphere of the family, and as representing a twisted order in which Black families are subject to intense state scrutiny around child abuse, yet the carceral state gives no second chances to ‘ill-disciplined’ youth (Bledsoe and Sow, 2011; Maier and Coleman, 2011). In Nigeria, corporal punishment is widespread (in considering this, it is essential to note the influence of punitive discipline under colonialism), but is has recently been non-legally ‘banned’ in schools by the Lagos State Government. Private schools in this study all emphasised that they adhered to this ban and as far as I could verify this was true.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 750495.