Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:We have a friend who bailed on the Hill a couple years ago over schools issues. Her child has moved onto an AAP center in Fairfax, while ours, who is the same age, is at Brent. I'm not convinced that her child learns more than mine a given week. She's far from the Smithsonians now, while we walk down most weekends. Our child takes seriously good music and art classes a 5-minute walk from our house, and visit the the local library across the street almost every day. She has to drive her kid everywhere, or put him on a school bus. My kids' classmates have parents who are World Bank economists, design Mars rovers for NASA, serve as senior diplomats and military officers, and drive legislative battles in the Senate.
I'm not buying that Fairfax offers young families more overall, at least at the elementary school level.
Is the topic the actual stuff that is taught in school, or the opportunities to learn outside of school?
I'm not the poster you are addressing, but in her case as well as mine it is both. Brent is a fabulous school and the after school and neighborhood opportunities cannot be matched in fairfax.
Yes, so why both separating what a kid learns outside school for what they learn inside school when considering the kind of education they're getting? You can't argue that Brent is better academically than a Fairfax GT program; it isn't. But there's still a strong case to be made for our urban environment being far richer intellectually, and, in many ways, healthier, than the car-bound Fairfax scene. Our friends who've bailed for schools hardly seem to know their neighbors, even after living in the burbs for years, leaving them nostalgic for the Hill community. We know that the burbs aren't short of highly educated parents, but I'm still willing to hitch my start to the
urban pioneering spirit, which confers its own benefits. These include my kids watching 4th of July fireworks from our roof, chatting with lawmakers in local restaurants, taking the Metro for free with their new passes, walking to CHAW lessons on their own (at age 7 or 8), getting to outdoor movies and Folger on bikes in the summer, and running into the same interesting families all over the Hill.