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

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[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.

[quote=Anonymous]Personal story: I went to (public) school in an affluent suburb--my high school was sort of like the Whitman/BCC of its area.  Suffice it to say that the suburb was one where kids routinely received luxury cars for their 16th birthday (often the hand-me-downs from their parents).  My parents both worked, and we were solidly middle class in the true sense of the word (i.e. family of four in a 1500-sq ft. house, vacation travel only by car to free national parks, had an afterschool job to pay for non-essentials, it was a big deal to receive a present like a bicycle, etc.).  We lived in the "poor" section of my otherwise wealthy suburb.

In that day and age (I'm in my early 40s) my parents honestly didn't take me to volunteer at soup kitchens or the like--for one it wasn't that common in that day, but more importantly, they were always exhausted and busy because they were both working--and so, honestly, I grew up thinking we were much "poorer" than we actually were, because my frame of reference was my peers, and we had so much less than they did.  It wasn't until I got to college (state school, didn't want to take out loans for private) and realized how fortunate my family was compared with so many.  I know that sounds shocking that it wasn't until college, and maybe we were shallow :), but you'd be surprised how important one's peer group is in terms of comparing lifestyles (there is research on this).

I wouldn't want my kids to have a similarly skewed sense.

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