用户1340774522 :Private Schools Have Become Truly Obscene https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/private-schools-are-indefensible/618078/

[...] The Dalton parent is not supposed to be on the wrong side of a savage inequality. She is supposed to care about savage inequalities; she is supposed to murmur sympathetically about savage inequalities while scanning the news, her gentle concern muffled by the jet-engine roar of her morning blowout. But she isn’t supposed to fall victim to one.

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Why do these parents need so much reassurance? They “are finding that it’s harder and harder to get their children through the eye of the needle”—admitted into the best programs, all the way from kindergarten to college. But it’s more than that. The parents have a sense that their kids will be emerging into a bleaker landscape than they did. The brutal, winner-take-all economy won’t come for them—they’ve been grandfathered in. But they fear that it’s coming for their children, and that even a good education might not secure them a professional-class career.

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Like all Quaker schools, Sidwell aims to help children listen for and respond to the still, small voice of God. But it’s safe to say the contemporary Sidwell parent cares more about college admissions than about Quakerism. And if she tells you the two go hand in hand, then she doesn’t really understand college admissions (or, perhaps, Quakerism).

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College admissions is one of the few situations in which rich people are forced to scramble for a scarce resource. What logic had led them to believe that it would help to antagonize the college counselors? Driven mad by the looming prospect of a Williams rejection, they had lost all reason.

Private schools regularly make decisions that parents don’t understand. Like ancient peoples, the parents try to make sense of the clues. They decide that college admissions must be the god of private school—wrong—or that the god must be AP scores, or sports, or institutional reputation. Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

The god of private school is money.

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What forms of payment will these schools accept? You name it. No matter what your assets, they’ll find a way to cash them out for you. The Spence School, in New York City, notes that you can make a donation by credit card, by check, or by a gift of securities—shares of stocks or mutual funds. You can designate money for the school in your will, or donate funds from your retirement plan, or make the school a beneficiary of your life-insurance plan, or form a charitable trust.

[...] * Forty-seven percent of the winners of “class legacy prizes”—academic awards given to students in each class—attended private schools. This is why wealthy parents think it’s life-and-death to get their kids into the right prep school—because they know that the winners keep winning.

[...] She said that in all the prep-school diversity-and-inclusion programs, “there’s always this preface of ‘Okay, we’re now welcoming you to the majority, where you should be’—with the white people, so to speak.” But “inherently within that, you are sacrificing who you are as a person—and it’s not like that would ever happen on the opposite end.” There had been costs to going to Spence. One of those, she now realizes, was “sacrificing my Blackness.”

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The problems at these schools are endemic to their business model. Their existence depends on an unseemly closeness between the wealthiest parents and the most powerful administrators. The current system is devoted to excess—bigger, better, more. The schools compete with one another over programs and campuses; many have such luxurious facilities that they’re almost revolting.

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In those innocent days, I thought of schools as places of actual transformation. You came in as one person and left as another. In the fall, the Valley heat was intense, and Macbeth was weird. In the spring, the jacaranda trees burst into flower and Macbeth was ambitious. And after that, it was time for the boys to leave. We didn’t have anything else to give them.   2021-03-29 22:20:29  举报 收藏 操作