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.  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][/b]

This is what my experience was like. I graduated from a private high school here in the DC area (graduation year 1995), not big three, but probably 'big five' if that exists. (I haven't paid attention to know what the classification being used here is). I was accepted to an Ivy League college but was SO burnt out by the time that I got there that it took me two years to recover. Grades were terrible in freshman and sophomore years of college and then I pulled them up in Junior and Senior years. I was just co completely exhausted by getting into college that all I could do freshman year was zone out and hang out. More importantly, it took me a very long time to enjoy learning again after high school. I loved learning in elementary and middle schools, hated all the pressure around it in high school, and only regained my love of learning in the later years of college.

Also, 17:16's email rang very true with me. At this point we could afford private without much stress because we live well below our means in a condo and we have only one kid. But I really don't think I could ever send my child to have a similar experience to that which I had in school. Besides the academic pressure, there was so much political stuff going on. From 7th to 10th grades, I was best friends with a girl whose family was incredibly politically connected. I spent summers on the Cape with her, hobnobbing with her politico family members. She would have been a great connection in adulthood if I ever would have followed up the connection. Instead, I have avoided her like the plague because, well, I just don't have very good memories of how I felt either at school or in that friendship. I constantly felt like my normal, not politically connected family was inferior and that she was doing me a favor to be friends with me. At the time, this was only a little bit about money and mostly about political connections. There were other bright spots in y life that helped, like the community that I had at my violin studio and the kids I met through my soccer team. But overall, I became more and more miserable at my school as I got older and realized that what everybody cared about was in order of importance: 1) what type of family political connections you had; 2) how much money you had; 3) what car you drove; 4) where you vacationed (or didn't! gasp!) in the summer.

As others have stated, the friends that I like from my private school are not sending their kids to private school -- they have them enrolled in public school. [/quote]

To the poster who said that her dc did not experience 1-4, I would say you are probably not at one of the tippity top schools.  It was really interesting to realize after coming from DC that so many others had experienced a hierarchy based almost exclusively on money, whereas while money and political connections frequently go hand in hand here, it is definitely the "I am important because of who my parents are, not what they have" here and it really is all about politics.  The other thing is the way I first learned about elections was best friends having to move back if elections were lost and the parents did not become lobbyists.  But really an awful environment for kids from normal families....[/quote]

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