James Rogers wrote:
> After doing some research a while back, I basically went from agnostic to
> being firmly in the anti-public school camp. The track record of public
> education in this country has been disasterous for the most part, but the
> problem is that so many people are used to sucking off the government teat
> that they are unwilling to exercise their right to something better.
This is not scientific, only my own experiences and opinion.
For a couple of years in my life I lived in New England and met many people
who went private schools, to chi-chi college prep schools and then to
Harvard-Dartmouth-Yale and such colleges (this was my exposure to a
different tradition than that to which I was exposed, i.e., a middle-class
West Coast public school life).
And how different did I find the "Top Ten" East Coast crowd compared to the
people I'd known before? Not different at all. More snooty, definitely.
Many of the young men spoke with a uniformly affected whiny nasal
inflection - and that very well may have been the biggest difference, right
there. The private-school crowd were just as smart, and just as dumb, as
anyone I'd ever known before. The fact that many of the East Coast crowd
seemed to think of themselves as "anointed" compared to the rest of the
world's population was somewhat vexing to me. But one incident, especially,
still stands out in my mind: I overheard several young wives talk about
another young wife who stuttered a little (all the respective wives had
husbands who were graduate students at Tuck Business School), tsk-tsk'g
about what a liability the wife with the stutter would be for her husband.
But this was a generation ago. Maybe things have changed.
But I still don't think private school students get a better education
compared to students who go to public schools, generally. What is
"education," anyway? Maybe children who go to private schools become
culturally deprived, in a way. I know my own kids benefited from the
diversity of people they found in public schools throughout their school
years - they've actually expressed this to me.
Olga
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:12 MDT