Boarding schools, those clannish institutions that are sometimes regarded with suspicion — since they may be either bastions of privilege or halfway houses for the wayward teen — have captured a new market: two-year-olds.    

Although boarding kindergartens have existed in China for decades — the Weihai Kindergarten, one of the most prestigious boarding kindergartens in Shanghai, China, was founded in 1951 — they are becoming less unusual and more highly sought after.  

At the Li Mai School, a boarding school located in the farmland outside Beijing, students as young as two years old board on campus from Monday until Friday, at which point some of them are collected by their parents and are whisked home.

Shang Shangu, the principal of a boarding kindergarten in Shangai, explained that part of the appeal of the boarding kindergartens is that they offer their students academic and personal advantages that are unavailable to their peers at day schools; these two-year-olds are developing a competitive edge over the broader educated population. Speaking about her students, Shang Shangu stated that “in order for them to be able to compete, we need to help them build up their self-respect and self-confidence.” Self-respect and self-confidence make a marketable individual.  

Boarding kindergartens are, at least partially, a function of the developing Chinese social and market economy, and they speak to an underlying anxiety. The Chosun Ilbo reports that 17 percent of all 18- to 22-year-olds in China were admitted to colleges and universities last year. For the new middle class, the competition for higher education is stiff and, with most couples having only one child, a family’s ambitions may come to rest on one little pair of shoulders.

Such a hysterical desire for a competitive edge is not unique to China, nor is it limited to the anxieties of an emerging middle class; Japan is notorious for its cram schools, or juku, where students take private classes to supplement their public or private school education, just as the privileged New Yorker is famous for purchasing numerous tutors for his or her child. Education has always brought with it social advantage, but what is interesting about the boarding kindergarten phenomenon is the ferocity of the drive for a competitive edge at such a young age.

At a time of rapid globalization and attendant social change, these boarding kindergartens should highlight — without any particular judgment — the very concrete social consequences of broader economic and political transformation.

Mimi Hanaoka