samsara
After reviewing...oh, I dunno...thirty? forty?...private school websites today (for work, I swear) I have come up against one unassailable question again and again: do that many people really have that much money? How can there be that many people in the world who can afford to shell out $10,000 to $20,000 per year to send their kid to elementary school? I know there are scholarships but even so, you have to figure that some large proportion of the parents of those students are paying nearly full price.
I also wonder if the education they are receiving is worth that much money. Or is it less a question of the education per se and more of a social determinate, a class system: I went to Taft vs. I went to Mifflin? Not to get reverse-hoity-toity (whatever that means), but I can proudly say that I attended Columbus Public schools back when bussing was in effect and kids fashioned bong equipment in Industrial Arts, cannibis brownies in Home Ec., blunts in the bathrooms, joints in gym, reefers during recess, jammed fake quarters in the one snack machine, drove their 1985 Reliant K-cars over the concrete barriers to beat the school busses to the traffic light, rode Schwin 10-speeds to Speedway to get candybars before practice, and lugged our beat-up band instruments home on foot rather than stuffing them in the trunk of daddy's 5-series. Sure, there were wealthy kids at public school, but that was because they sold several grams of heroin during and after school and were 22 years old. Our textbooks were crap, our teachers were overworked and many didn't care anymore. (My 12th-grade English teacher, for instance, had as many days on vacation as she did in class.) We only had two AP classes offered: Calculus and Runnin' from the Cops. We didn't have an equestrian team or a lacrosse team or a water polo team. We barely had a football team.
Despite all those obstacles, you can't hardly say my ejukashun weren't purty dang good. Plus not every kid was rich + white. And if there's one thing I learned at the $20,000 per year private liberal arts college I graduated from, it's that rich + white = bad.
posted by e at 12:20 PM
1 Comments:
jnf, you've hinted at what Neil Postman used to say about the value of public school: namely that public schools are there not simply for the individual student or their families but for the 'public,' the 'nation.' Meaning, specifically, that having a student like Maz in school helps the rest of us learn in some small way. I know that when the ESL program for Columbus Public was moved to my high school, that I saw more Russians, Croatians, Koreans, Iranians, and Argentineans than I had ever seen before (or since). They were all speaking their own languages and at the same time trying to fit in with the 'Americans.' It was the 'melting pot' ideal at it's best, or worst, depending on how you feel about cultural assimilation.
At the same time, it seems like some of the people who need cultural exposure the most--i.e., the children of the wealthy who will themselves probably be the CEOs and lawyers and politicians and 'leaders; of the future--have the ability to enclave themselves away from diversity in the socio-economic sense. Which, of course has the added affect of making all of the other schools, public and parochial, an enclave of one socio-economic type too.
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