I don’t get the logic of this. Are those of us who didn’t go to elite schools and Ivy League colleges minced meat?
I do have kids. Two of them. The first is in kindergarten and heading to first grade. He goes to public school. He has wonderful teachers. His class has three of them. They study a wide range of things and their education includes a healthy mix of activities. The name of the school is inconsequential because it doesn’t matter.
My son is greatly interested in astronomy, geography/cartography and a bit of biology/archaeology. My ambitions for him are not to study at Brown or some other fossilised grooming centre, but a college where real work (and affordable education) is done in science (science because that’s his interest, not because science is better than art or literature)… perhaps UCSD, Berkeley, Rutgers. I don’t care whether he reads Trollope or not (though I admit I would be more than a bit cheered if he does read Penrose and Camus and Tagore).
I say all this because I don’t get the point of this debate… all of the above is not different from the wishes of, and is within the reach of, a middle-class family (the 70% that everyone seems to ignore, as a wise man recently pointed out in a podcast), using the public system, where it is not being systematically raped by neoliberals.
I have no idea what St. Ann is nor am I particularly interested (because I do not want more than what is already possible through the public school system, since I believe it suffices to ensure a happy future for my children (*)). If it is anything like the uppity private and/or boarding schools that I know of from India, or the performance mills for the wealthy that churn out preppy, self-assured and test-prepped adolescents, I want to have nothing to do with it.
Of course the plural of anecdote is not data, and in fact, in my case, there is reason to believe that my particular anecdote(s) is/are unrepresentative of the data. I live in a predominantly white county where the median income exceeds both the national and the state average (my town, however, is not among the rich towns — home to Wall St bankers and Bruce Springsteen — that make up the county). This difference however, I think, only means that we are not stripped of cash (despite the frequent fund-raisers) and subject to experiments by Bill Gates.
To sum it up, I think Diane Ravitch would agree with me, that the answers to what makes a good education are well known and where political interference is least, have been well implemented in the existing public system. I don’t run in the prep[py] school circles and so I cannot comment on M. Smith’s point that they are as sucky as any public school, but I would agree with him (if that be his point) that they are irrelevant to the real problem. If some utopia lies beyond the better public schools, then I suspect it’s not in the direction of riding stables and cotillions. :-)
—ravi
(*) this summer we, here at my much celebrated and decorated research institution, have a student intern from the local public school. She is about 15. The other day she explained to someone, ad hoc, in the aisle, how Bayes Theorem is applied to spam filtering. She has read David Foster Wallace and thinks (or should I saw “knows”) that he's overhyped. Who can ask for anything more?