Reply to Top private (Sidwell, GDS) versus top public (JKLM) for early years: what are the differences?

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Reply to "Top private (Sidwell, GDS) versus top public (JKLM) for early years: what are the differences? "

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Good guess, LOL!  Very close.

I, too, worry about happiness and, actually, about education -- in the sense of turning our kids onto the delights of reading, thinking, problem-solving, empathizing, figuring things out...

Not so much an issue (for the kids, at least) at the elementary school level -- though the instrumentalist of many parents is already apparent at that stage.  But by HS, even (maybe especially) the kids who love to read and think are under tremendous pressure to just power through crushing workloads with no time to really reflect on what they're learning, much less to pursue interesting tangents.  [b]My own childhood and adolescence was filled with such opportunities and when I arrived at college I was like a kid in a candy store.   [/b]

But had my HS education looked like the Big 3 experience today, I'd have been burnt out and/or needed a gap year [/quote]

Please PP, tell me how I can give this to my kid.  Go off the grid entirely?[/quote]

I failed on that score.  And, perhaps as a result, my answer is close to "go off the grid!"

In case it's any help, I think I know where I went wrong.  I sought out for my DC the "challenging" school I never had.  In retrospect, I see how much I benefited from the absence of externally-imposed challenges.  Basically, I got/had to choose my own intellectual adventures, so to speak.  And I lived in CA near a young university (a "first-rate second-rate school," according to one of my undergrad profs at what would no doubt be considered a first-rate first-rate school) which no doubt helped -- free to dirt-cheap access to libraries and classes, enough profs in the neighborhood for a good intellectually-inclined HS cohort and for encouragement/advice, but outnumbered enough by the dominant culture to be open to people from outside the U who shared their values/interests).  But I know, because my parents and sibs still live in the area, that today my DC couldn't have the same childhood that I had there.  What I don't know is whether those days are just gone or whether you could find the same environment in a different place today.  I hope the latter, but am pretty sure it wouldn't be in or near a major US city on either coast (or Chicago for that matter).

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