SEMINAR: Anthropology and Sociology Seminar Series

We start from the notion of Ball&Nikita (2014) who ask for considering “the educational choices and choice making contexts of a burgeoning, mobile, post-national middle class who operate on a global scale, or perhaps more precisely, who act locally and think globally.” Our data basis consists of the thread of an online forum (Toytown Germany), where people from all over the world ask for advice concerning school choice when moving to Berlin. The relatively contained spaces of interaction marked by the “international schools in Berlin” thread allow us to shift the scope from the local to the global spheres and back again. These globally mobile parents, who are part of the increasingly significant skilled migrant diaspora, express various concerns about the educational needs of their children, from language acquisition, to keeping up with educational requirements for university in their home country, to desires that their children be exposed to a broad range of cultural influences. The analysis of the data reveals the concentration of the discourse on two contrasting schools as two versions of dealing with the requirement of localizing within a new environment. John F. Kennedy School stands for an American way of schooling within the midst of Berlin and furthermore for a model of migration which tries to include the possibility of going back – or going elsewhere, being part of the (worldwide) American culture. Nelson Mandela School in contrast is appreciated for its “multi-cultural” setting which is praised as the real “Berlin experience”. Understanding oneself as part of a multi-cultural setting that can be found in some metropolis of the world may be another solution of the tension between mobility and the need of localization with respect to school children. The common feature of both versions of migration is the crucial part the school plays in it: Every step of locating oneself in a new environment requires a choice of a school as soon as children are involved. Schools are not only perceived as institutions of qualification and important agents in careers but as well as agents of socialization and imprinting into “culture”.