Public Schools

As I listen to Rick Santorum proudly proclaim he has home schooled his children, and as I listen to Republicans of all stripes of deride public education as one more intervention by government into the lives of people, I have to laugh. Public schools as the heavy hand of government. Better replace them with vouchers for private schools or charter schools, but kill the Department of Education and dispense with the whole idea of spending your hard earned tax dollars to educate the children of the undeserving poor or the recently arrived.

My wife and I both went to public schools, she in a suburb of San Francisco and I schooled in an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C. Both school systems were supposed to be wonderful, the best money could buy.

One of my sons went to the same public schools I had attended and the other, floundering, ultimately wound up in a very upscale private school, the sort of school where your schoolmates had parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles who had preceded them.

What I think I saw was the public school my son attended, for all its success getting kids into the Ivy League, was jarringly uneven in its academic quality. For one advanced placement class in world history, his homework was coloring maps. On the other hand, he had two English teachers out of the four during his tenure, who taught him how to write, who taught him critical thinking. As idiotic as some of his teachers were, there were some who were very high quality, as high quality as any my son had at the renown private school .

What I saw in the private school, clearly among the parents, and this was conveyed to their children on some level, tacitly or explicitly, was a sense of superiority. This ranged from an unctuous smugness which came out at dinner parties where parents reminisced about their days at Harvard, as if everyone around the table was expected to have attended Harvard. And one parent endured a good deal of good natured ribbing because his daughter had decided to attend Stanford, and there was a lot of joshing about the disgrace her father must feel.

What I saw at the public school, among the parents, at back to school night, was a sense of community. I sat through the teacher's presentation about the music theory course and walking out of that room with my neighbor we looked at each other and blurted out, "I would not last a day in that class. It is way beyond rocket science."

We saw each other at the community swimming pool and we asked after each other's children. When a child, driving drunk, collided head on with another car on a bridge, we all knew the kid who was driving and we knew the man he sent to the hospital. We lived through each other's ups and downs. When a kid we had all watched as a seven year old soccer phenom did not make the high school varsity, we all commiserated and decided soccer was not that important after all.

The private school rescued my son, academically. The small classes left him nowhere to hide and he more or less had to succeed. He loved the school and he still has friends from that school, now even in his twenties. But he has friends from his neighborhood, too. He went to the private school only for high school. He wasn't there long enough to have internalized that sense of being a chosen person, who was meant to be privileged, and programmed and guaranteed to succeed.

There was a sense of having been benefited beyond what I had earned, when I went to a private college. It was the 60's and a lot of us struggled with rich man's guilt which some called winner's guilt. We were not severely afflicted because, although we were Ivy League, we were in the bottom tier of the Ivy League, not the big three, so we could feel less than the Elect.

Somehow, in a way it's hard to describe without going into more detail, there was something a little poisonous about the private school experience.

One quick story: At dinner, after a lot of hearty congratulations about children who were going off to Harvard and Stanford and Princeton, I piped up with a story about having watched the Stanford girls' softball team defeat the team from Texas for the national championship. I was new to the group, and there were indulgent smiles around the table, as I babbled on with my non sequitur. "Yes," I said, "Those girls were wonderful athletes, those Stanford players. They interviewed some after the game. And listening to them, you know, I somehow did not think these particular girls had scored 1600 on their college boards."

An icy silence gripped the room. Finally, the woman at my right elbow, Harvard '73, looked at me and said, "I think you might be surprised."

Oh, I thought, I think not.