Reply to The case for "low rigor" at highly competitive private lower schools?

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[quote=Anonymous]I disagree with your premise but you highlight a different mindset that might be at work.

Fundamentally, the reason we make the investment in a very expensive private school is that we believe in a more progressive approach to education. In the early years, the goal is to develop the child's social and emotional skills as much as the academics. We want our child to manage themselves emotionally, navigate all sorts of social situations, and develop influence and leadership skills. We don't just value art and drama for presentation skills, but to explore artistic sensibilities or interest and appreciation of the arts. We believe that joy in learning isn't internalized with carrots and stick or rote skill acquisition, but by actually making learning fun and appropriate for the child's actual intellectual development.

The "academic rigor" in elementary school used in the public G&T and AAP aren't very meaningful to us.  We had every confidence that our child would be on the front of any achievement curve because she has every possible advantage in the world. So our focus was on meaning and concepts, not mechanics. My child was reading at 4, but is only just not learning how to read literature closely in middle school. She learned her multiplication tables "organically" with manipulatives and games in 2nd grade so she never thought of math as "boring." But it will be a few years before she gets to the post-calculus math that will determine how far she can go in the sciences. Our worry is that too much attention to hitting arbitrary milestones can be harmful for long-term success because it ignores figuring out when she would be most developmentally ready to go fast and when to go slow.  Now that she's going to high school, I feel pretty confident that her academic skills are second to none but the oddball prodigy.

A more blunt way of saying it is that we want our child to be a "boss" not a "grind." We wanted a school to cultivate our child as someone who asks the questions that other need to answer and has the skills to get other people to see things differently.  And it doesn't matter to us whether she chooses to be an artist or an entertainer rather than an academic or lawyer or doctor as long as she uses her talents at the highest level possible. [/quote]

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