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've been giving this a lot of thought, lately.  Full disclosure is that my child attends a private school in NW DC and there is just one child in his class whose parents seem to be members of the working class.   Everyone else has parents who are professionals and most are highly paid ones at that, relative to the rest of the United States.

I'm OK with this, so long as everything else is in order.   ie, the children are kind, hard working, not jerks to each other, thoughtful.   Instead of daily lessons on how to select the very best Beluga caviar or Bordeaux, the kids learn math, science and also do community service.   They have arguments and work it out, sometimes with the intervention of adults if needed, and the arguments are never about the relative merits of Ibiza vs. Capri in September.

What I'm saying is, my child's actual peer experience, with that economically heterogenous crowd, is no different that his after-school/weekend experience with a crowd that is wildly diverse, economically.

[/quote]

I'm glad that your child's peer experience does not include selecting the best caviar or where to summer, and that the kids are nice.  But this is a total straw man.  Nobody wants to send their kids to a "lifestyles of the rich and famous" school.

The point is that your kid's class includes only one member of the working class, as you say.  Your kid is not doing group projects with kids who have different life experiences from his own.  Your kid is not going to birthday parties where the big present is the Bratz shopping mall instead of an iPad.  And I hate to break it to you, but kids in private school (which we've done) do compare where everybody is going for vacation, and they are awed by the kids who take fabulous vacations.

Your child's peer experience is actually quite limited, even with the after school activities.  And no, playing travel soccer after school and on weekends with a couple of talented Nicaraguan kids doesn't count.  That's not real interaction, because it's completely structured and moderated by adults.[/quote]

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