The Internet (well, My Internet) is abuzz this morning with outrage over Allison Benedikt’s call to shutter private schools in order to get affluent parents to start giving a damn about their local public school districts. This is a policy which I’m on the record as supporting, but it is also one which is deeply unpopular amongst American political élites of all stripes (the Obamas famously send their children to the posh Sidwell Friends School). For the educated upper and upper-middle classes, private secondary school is seen both as a fundamental justification for earning money in the first place, and also an expression of parental solicitude in its highest form. Shouldn’t we want the best for our children, such families ask, even if that best costs more each year than a low-income salary, and even if there are undesirable social effects in the aggregate? Why should my child suffer when I have the power to spend the money I have earned to buy her out of that suffering? Undergirding all of this is a blank fear of the soul-devouring, dunce-spewing hellscape that is the modern public school. Furious with Benedikt’s article, one Twitter commentator wrote “We don’t want to send you to a gulag. Just your kids will do, thanks.”
A gulag? The American public school system has its problems, but to compare it with forced labor in subhuman Siberian camps seems a stretch. A swirly is demeaning, sure, but I betcha Solzhenitsyn would’ve traded up for a swirly at any time. And all of this just doesn’t square with the public school experience I went through. To be fair, I grew up in New Hampshire—hardly a cauldron of the kind of urban poverty with which we most closely associate troubled schools—but my high school was big, diverse, and full of its own messes. With 67% white students, a 6.2% cumulative dropout rate, and 39% of students on food subsidies (source), it’s a school that’s actually pretty close to the national average on all those statistics. We had AP classes but no Mandarin or Nabokov or Existentialism; we had a former football player as a principal and cheerleader as an activities director. In other words, a fairly par-for-the-course American high school experience.
And you know what? It was pretty OK. There were certainly times that I hated it, or felt left out, or thought that I could be learning more. And I probably could have been learning more! I could have gone off to college as a germinate violin prodigy, or expert in fractals, or aspiring literary translator. But I didn’t—I went off to college as a fairly ordinary, tolerably well-adjusted kid. And even though a lot of the press and rhetoric around school reform worries about how we can pump out more superstars, I’m much more concerned about how we can turn out fairly ordinary, tolerably well-adjusted kids. As Nicholson Baker writes in this month’s Harper’s: “Life’s prerequisites are courtesy and kindness, the times tables, fractions, percentages, ratios, reading, writing, some history—the rest is gravy, really.” And one way we can make this happen is to make sure the kids who are courteous and kind and whose parents want to make sure they know the times tables and so on are not skimmed off and sent elsewhere.
Supporters of a private school ban see its chief value as a way of prodding political support: if wealthy, powerful parents had no choice but to send their children to public school, they’d do their damnedest to make sure those public schools were in good shape. I think that’s right, although outmigration from cities would likely happen, too. In my view, though, the better reason for banning private schools is as a method of to getting kids of different backgrounds to mix together, and thereby learn from each others’ good influences—a kind of schoolyard sifting and winnowing. As Dylan Matthews notes, “the idea that having rich kids go to bad public schools is ‘punishing’ them is silly. Rich kids are fine wherever.” And it’s true—kids from supportive families (whether rich or not) will get to read at home, talk about ideas over the dinner table, play with educational toys, and do all of the other things which cultivate a lively young mind. And when they go to school, they’ll rub shoulders with the kids whose parents have neither the financial nor cultural capital to prioritize education. And hopefully some of that influence will rub off. It’s hardly a straightforward process, but one thing’s for sure: if you take all the good kids and send them off to a club of privilege, that rubbing-off will never have a chance.
I was a nerdy kid: I liked outer space and long books and following the rules. I went to high school with kids who lived in projects, kids who lived in trailer parks, kids who were addicted to drugs before they hit high school, kids that got in fights often, kids that had spent time in jail. I like to think that, if even in the smallest way, me sharing a lunchroom and a school bus and a few classes with those kids at least gave them the glinting possibility of modeling a different type of behavior. More importantly, I also think that I benefitted from sharing an education with them. Proximity is the first prerequisite for sympathy. In school I learned that professors and lawyers are not better people than janitors and gas station attendants, and I learned how to relate myself to people whose tastes were very different from mine. I learned what it’s like to be mistrusted, and I learned how to carefully cultivate trust. In the final measure, like it or not, we all share a nation and a globe with each other that we can’t buy our way out of, so learning to get along with both the high and the low is an awfully important skill indeed.
So remember: when a smart kid gets sent to big public school, that kid suddenly becomes a public good; his or her very presence there is a tiny improving force for all of society, and all the while he himself is improved by the experience.
http://viewshed.matinic.us/2013/08/29/441/