Life in the Taco Lane: Expat Lifestyles. Finding Our Way Through Back-to-School Season

By Doreen Cumberford

In summer, a familiar conversation ripples through San Miguel's expat community: where will the children go to school next year? Parents compare curricula, fees, class sizes and commutes. What we discuss less often is the truth underneath: choosing a school here is not simply choosing an education. We are consciously or unconsciously choosing a culture, and not only for our children. For the whole family.

The options around San Miguel are remarkably varied for a town this size. Some families want a US or Canadian curriculum, keeping the door open for university applications up north.

Others choose bilingual Mexican schools, where Spanish is the language of the playground and the child becomes, within months, the family's most fluent member. Still others step off the traditional path: Waldorf and Montessori programmes, pod schooling with a handful of families sharing a teacher, homeschooling around the kitchen table, or world schooling, where the town, the mercado and the travel itinerary become the classroom.

Each choice is legitimate. But each quietly answers cultural questions we may not realise we are being asked. What values will be transmitted? A traditional curriculum tends to prize individual achievement, grades and measurable progress. A Mexican school may place more weight on community, respect for teachers and the group. Waldorf and Montessori carry their own philosophies about childhood itself. Each has a different answer to what education is for.

Whose rules will govern the classroom? Mexican schools generally hold the teacher in higher authority than many of us grew up with. Parents from more egalitarian school cultures may expect quick, frank communication by email. Here, concerns travel more formally, and relationships always come first. The parent teacher conference is not just a progress report; it is a relationship being steadily built.

I remember living abroad and having no choice. On our company compound in Saudi Arabia there was one school, full stop. Some thirty-five nationalities filled its classrooms, everyone studied in English, and each child could add either Arabic, French or Spanish. We did not get to choose that culture; it chose us. And it framed our family's entire social world: the friendships, the interests, the farewells and the sports. Let's encourage parents to choose deliberately from the plethora of options San Miguel offers.

Then there is the most interesting question of all: which culture will your family really live in?

Because the school we choose becomes the front door to our social world.

Choose an international curriculum and your WhatsApp groups, birthday parties and Friday coffees will fill with globally mobile families like your own.

Choose a Mexican school and you will find yourself at tamal sales and school fairs, learning the choreography of the whole-class birthday party, the piñata, the fiesta that starts late and ends later. Your September will include Independence Day assemblies, your November an altar for Día de Muertos, your December a posada with candles and song. Many schools here train kids to cross cultures by celebrating everything. Homeschool or world school, and your community becomes something you deliberately build, family by family, park by park.

One more layer: whichever system we choose, our children are growing up as third culture kids, raised between their parents' culture and the one outside their front door. Our family now has third and fourth generation TCKs. The school situations we place our kids in shape our sense of identity and belonging more than we know. But back to school season is not only for families with children.

While in our third chapter of life, August can ask the same question in a different way. Are we interested in going back to school? Do we have the bandwidth for more Spanish?

How about a subject that always intrigued us? We could pursue a new interest in a studio, a lecture hall, a conversation circle or a writing group. We position ourselves for learning just as families do: we enroll.

As the new school year begins, compare the curricula and count the classroom hours. But what would happen if we asked some other questions? What kind of community do we want to belong to? How much of México do we want, or can we handle, inside our daily life? Which culture do we want our children, and ourselves, to be shaped by?

We think we are just enrolling the children. In truth, the life school enrolls us all!

Doreen Cumberford, I.C. Trainer, Author & Podcaster