Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think many of the parents who are choosing public school because they think their child will be sensitized to how other people live have a very naive view of how schools like that really work. I grew up in a good sized town that had one large public high school that everyone in town went to. There were no private schools near by. The only other option was boarding school, but it was a decent school, and very few people felt the need to send their kids elsewhere. We had students across the spectrum, from quite rich (the child of one of the highest earning professional golfers of the time) to the kids from public housing. All races, with sizable black and hispanic populations. I played sports with the black kids, and we were very friendly. I'm sure some of the people I had in my classes were poor, but I couldn't really tell you which ones.

For the most part, I hung out with the kids who were like me. I didn't visit the homes of the kids who were poor or culturally different, and I can't really tell you anything about what their lives were like outside of school. I definitely wasn't unique in this regard. I did have one very good black friend, but her parents were better educated and higher income than mine. Her mother was just a darker-skinned version of my mom. This wasn't a conscious choice, but it just was. If your child goes to a school where he or she is a distinct minority, then this "diversity" experience might work, but I still suspect that kids will always end up spending the bulk of their time with people who are really like them, even if their skin is a different color. Walking through a school hallway doesn't give you any more appreciation for how other people live than walking down a downtown street.

Out of school, you only hung out with middle class black kids?

Interesting. I had a somewhat similar high school experience, except that I was right here in DCPS. I am black uppper-middle (or maybe it was middle, not sure) class. I went to Wilson where there was a little bit of everything in terms of racial and economic diversity. While my primary friends were pretty much from my same background and race, I did have meaningful interaction with people from all across the spectrum. While I may not have appreciated the perspective gained from the experience at the time, as soon as I moved on to college, I felt like I had a much better understanding of the differences in the world and also less of a tendency to make snap judgments about people based on their appearance/background (or at least when I do, I am able to call myself on it better). I feel like I would not have learned as much about other people and other ways of being if I had gone to school in an environment where everyone was from the same racial/economic background.

Anonymous wrote:I think many of the parents who are choosing public school because they think their child will be sensitized to how other people live have a very naive view of how schools like that really work. I grew up in a good sized town that had one large public high school that everyone in town went to. There were no private schools near by. The only other option was boarding school, but it was a decent school, and very few people felt the need to send their kids elsewhere. We had students across the spectrum, from quite rich (the child of one of the highest earning professional golfers of the time) to the kids from public housing. All races, with sizable black and hispanic populations. I played sports with the black kids, and we were very friendly. I'm sure some of the people I had in my classes were poor, but I couldn't really tell you which ones.

For the most part, I hung out with the kids who were like me. I didn't visit the homes of the kids who were poor or culturally different, and I can't really tell you anything about what their lives were like outside of school. I definitely wasn't unique in this regard. I did have one very good black friend, but her parents were better educated and higher income than mine. Her mother was just a darker-skinned version of my mom. This wasn't a conscious choice, but it just was. If your child goes to a school where he or she is a distinct minority, then this "diversity" experience might work, but I still suspect that kids will always end up spending the bulk of their time with people who are really like them, even if their skin is a different color. Walking through a school hallway doesn't give you any more appreciation for how other people live than walking down a downtown street.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sorry, but arguing that "I never mingled with the poor kids at my own school" doesn't cut it. First, your own behavior (too busy studying? introvert? clueless? geek? cheerleader?) can't be generalized to everybody, including your own kid. Second, you can't get from your statement to a justification for sending your kids to a school where everybody is rich, not just middle class.

That's the best you can do? First a personal attack, and then a misrepresentation of both the facts I presented as well as my argument?

Let's just say I send my children to private school, knowing that they will probably not learn much about diversity, but in the hope that they will at least learn how to make better arguments than many of the people who post on this board.

Anonymous wrote:Sorry, but arguing that "I never mingled with the poor kids at my own school" doesn't cut it. First, your own behavior (too busy studying? introvert? clueless? geek? cheerleader?) can't be generalized to everybody, including your own kid. Second, you can't get from your statement to a justification for sending your kids to a school where everybody is rich, not just middle class.

Anonymous wrote:11:29 and 13:45 - OP wrote ASKING for everybody's opinions. So people gave their opinions. You have the option not to read these opinions. But coming on here to complain that people are answering OP is a little silly....

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:11:29 and 13:45 - OP wrote ASKING for everybody's opinions. So people gave their opinions. You have the option not to read these opinions. But coming on here to complain that people are answering OP is a little silly....

I think their point is that people shouldn't even have an opinion about where others send their kids to school. Yeah, right. This is DCUM. everybody has an opinion about everything.

Anonymous wrote:11:29 and 13:45 - OP wrote ASKING for everybody's opinions. So people gave their opinions. You have the option not to read these opinions. But coming on here to complain that people are answering OP is a little silly....

Anonymous wrote: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.