I work in higher ed, and every day I work with students who come from public schools, private schools, charter schools, home school, etc.Originally Posted by DigitalChaos
And I gotta be honest, I'm not particularly blown away with what I've seen from most private school kids. The way people talk about private school, you'd expect these kids to be really advanced and brilliant, but they're mostly not. Once in a great while, I encounter someone who lives up to that stereotype. But by and large, most of them are indistinguishable from our public school kids, at least in terms of their level of intellect. And you'd be shocked how often I work with private school kids who are dumber than shit. It's a normal, regular thing.
On Monday, I encountered this 19 year old guy who went to a local private school, a school that costs around $25,000 a year. He can barely compose a sentence. He struggles with basic punctuation. And it's not like he has a disability. He's a perfectly capable guy, but he got a garbage education. I don't know if it was always like this, but I see this type of thing more and more these days. What I've learned is that a lot of these private schools are not willing to push their kids, because after all, private schools are a business first and foremost. If they're too hard on the students or if they upset the parents, they risk losing a customer. That expensive tuition comes with strings attached. When parents fork over 25 grand a year, they don't want to see their kid getting an F. People complain about grade inflation, but nowhere has worse grade inflation than in private education. I see kids all the time who got straight As in their private high school, and yet they're barely literate.
So in my opinion, a whole bunch of these private schools are basically just expensive degree mills. They're not paying for education in the true sense of the word; they're paying for the diploma. For me, these experiences have demolished any argument in defense of private schools, and I've begun to feel that Finland has the right idea in completely banning private education all together. The argument behind private education is that parents should have the right to give their kid a higher quality of education, but the truth is that private education has nothing to do with QUALITY of education and everything to do with CLASS and CULTURE. The kid I worked with on Monday is every bit as under-prepared as any kid from the inner city, but he's been socialized very differently. And that's really what it's all about for these families. It's a form of racial, political and cultural segregation disguised as a preference for "quality." It's the educational equivalent of gated communities.
We already live in a society that's becoming increasingly fragmented and polarized, and widespread privatization of schools would only make things worse in that regard. It's a form of regressive tribalism. "My faction verses your faction, I'm gonna raise my kids far away from you." It's not the right path.
