Reply to spin-off! What is so awful about attending school with exclusively upper middle class kids?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I agree that for some college/grad school is their first time interacting with people from varied racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.  I am Black, from an impoverished background, am the first to go past high school in my family and graduated from a top 20 law school.  I experienced so many of those kids from 'the bubbles' in law school.  Where do you summer?  It took me a while to figure this out...uh everyone does not "summer"...I work during summers to pay for my education.  Financial aid office like what is that, my parents always write a check.   My dad golfs with the partner at the firm so I don't even have to interview.  Questions like do you and your brother have the same father.    Seriously.  Basically early on the upper class identified each other based on the boarding school and private school connections they had and stuck together.   We just really had nothing in common.   This also applied to my fellow black students also that were mainly from well to do families and schools.   The uber wealthy black students separated themselves also.  And that is not to say that all were like this.  I made some really great friends in law school that were from uber wealthy families and for some reason they knew how to relate to people from all backgrounds, did not constantly refer to lifestyle topics related to their wealth, you would have no idea they were wealthy by material things and were really down to earth.  I do not know what was different about their upbringing but they were just amazing human beings who seemed to be aware of the gifts they had been given and seemed grateful but not caught up in it.  They were genuinely interested in getting to know who I was and what my experience was yet I was not their first black experience.  These were rare people to find amongst this group but they did exist.  The funny thing is most of the uber wealthy folks I was friends with did not even go on to be lawyers, they followed a passion of theirs in the arts or non-profit world...law school was just something to please the parents.   
As I am now a parent who can afford to send my children to most private schools, I am struggling with the decision of where to send them to school and this topic is one of the reasons.   Do I move from my lower middle class neighborhood (still in my first home) now that I can afford a neighborhood with much better public schools?  Do I stay where I am and send them to private and save on the higher housing cost yet retain the socioeconomic and cultural diversity within our current neighborhood though that may be lacking in the private school?  
Not sure what I will decide just yet, however what I do know is that I do not want to raise a child that was raised in a bubble like many that I ran into in the college/law school years.

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The "where did you summer" type isn't that way because they're rich. It's because they're socially lazy jerks who weren't brought up properly. I grew up in a gilded bubble and I've gotta tell you, it's not as opaque as people think. I would've had to not read a single book, never watched television, or a single movie for the first 18 years of my life for me not to know that everyone didn't grow up the way I did. The snobby types know how other people live, but rather than taking the time to get to know someone, it's easier to just ask a few poignant and, in my opinion, rude questions so they can quickly sort out who they want to get to know better.

You can send your children to private school and still have well rounded individuals by the time they're sent off to college. My parents made sure I knew that we were privileged without taking me to soup kitchens. Some examples, as a child, my toys were never stored or thrown away. I helped my mother pack them so they could be taken to organizations that helped poor families. I had an amazing West Indian woman who took helped to care for me, and with her help, we sent all my clothes to children in her country who were very poor. I remember being excited to find out if they liked what we sent. I was encouraged to give to charities very early in my life. In short, it's up to the parents to instill good values in their children well before they're sent off to school. Otherwise, it doesn't matter where you send them, they won't grow up to be the considerate, thoughtful adults you want them to be.[/quote]

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