Public Schools, Private Schools, and Real Education
By Colman McCarthy
About a year has passed since Washington was astir with questions on where Barak and Michelle Obama would school their daughters. They choose Sidwell Friends, a Northwest Washington private institution that offers sterling education: small and well-equipped classes, kempt athletic fields and mannered teachers aware of the school’s history of excellence and ties toi the Society of Friends. A large-lettered banner hangs over the school’s entrance: “The is no way to peace, peace is the way.”
Sidwell is in a neighborhood with other selective and expensive schools: St. Albans, National Cathedral, Maret, Edmund Burke and Georgetown Day. Parents who enroll their children, and have the incomes, connections and credentials to win admission, are like the Obamas: they want the best for their children, they believe they are buying quality.
I’m not so sure. What does best mean? What is quality? My doubts are grounded in 28 years teaching course on nonviolence in both public and private schools, starting in 1982 at School Without Walls and a few years later at Wilson High and Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School. At each, I’ve been a volunteer. At intervals and varied durations, I’ve had classes at four private schools: Landon, Stone Ridge, Georgetown Day and Maret. For three years, I taught in a prison for juveniles in Laurel, Md. By rough estimate I’ve had more than 3,000 students, not counting a similar number in local universities.
I’m not in the camp of those on the conservative Right who mock liberal parents like the Obamas with the jibe: their hearts are in the public schools but not their children. Nor am I with parents on the Left who claim moral superiority for having the money for a private school but choose a pubic one, i.e., using their children to take a political stand. The side I’m on is the one that respects all the choices as sincere, while knowing experientially from years of teaching children from families of wealth or poverty, and all bents, backgrounds, and dysfunctions, that private schools have their share of negatives, however much they are overshadowed by the ever bemoaned failures of public schools.
Faculties at elite schools know that they are paid to water flowers in educational hothouses, readying them to bloom in the future soils of quality colleges and graduate schools. The children are well-programmed to accept large amounts of homework, rack up AP credits and ace tests and exams. Progress, or lack of it, is closely monitored. It’s undeniable that parents who coop their young in private schools are r=greatly reducing the possibility that their children will be enriched with experiential learning as they are with theoretical learning. The children are likely to leave school idea-rich but experience-poor. Community service programs requiring a few hours a month dabbling at the soup kitchen won’t do it.
One private school that has broken away by seeking the benefits of experiential learning is the Madeira School for Girls in McLean, Va. On Wednesdays, juniors and seniors are released internships and community service. In recent years, I’ve had Madeira girls helping me teach at Wilson High. On arrival, they pass through metal detectors, walk through cacophonic halls where at least four D.C. police officers armed with weapons and wearing bullet-proof vests are keeping order. All that plus a truancy wagon out front shuttling in layabouts.
It’s hard to imagine a school as dissimilar from Madeira--its gentility, the classroom serenity, its stables for students’ horses, the order--as Wilson. Hungry to escape the isolation of their excellent but culturally moated school, and equally famished for the excitement of non-academic experiential learning that can happen at Wilson, my Madeira interns flourish. They taste and feel life.
Unlike the rarefied climate found a short walk down Wisconsin Avenue at Sidwell Friends, National Cathedral or St. Albans, Wilson, which has an equally gifted faculty and staff, oozes with diversity: students bound for the Ivies and ones well below grade level, ones whose parents have it all and ones who have little, students who live among political and corporate hustlers of Northwest Washington and those stuck with street hustlers in Northeast and Southeast. Wilson could be called Reality High. Or better, Real World Prep. It’s all there, a pot into which is melted much of what’s the seweetest and sourest of American life.
With many hours of class discussions about education over the years, I’ve never had a public school student express a yen to attend a private school. What for?, they would ask. Many of my students at Wilson, Walls and B-CC have friends at private schools but, knowingly, see them as overstressed academic captives--the underprivileged privileged.
Reversing, I’ve had plenty of private school students voice wishes to be in a public school. Some managed a transfer, to their relief.
As much as I admire private school students who earn high grades, I wonder what they are missing out on while grinding for 4.0 bliss. Often enough, but not always, students are being processed as if they are hunks of cheese at Velveeta Prep on the way to Cheddar U and Mozzarella grad school--and on to being a Big Cheese in life.
Do I have a preference for public or private school teaching? It’s like the question parents are asked, do you love one child over another? No, you love them the same, except some children--and students--make it easier to love than others.
Occasionally well-off parents quiz me if they should go private or public with their children. Ask them, I suggest. Trust their leanings. Private or public, it’s a risk either way. Remember, too, that for ill or good, parents are the prime educators, as are peers and the media, along with life’s inclemencies when the weather sours.
Lucky are the children who have caring parents, and lucky are us teachers who have them: whether they walk in halls that are hallowed or howling, whether they are the children of a president or a prisoner.
Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace. His recent book is “I’d Rather Teach Peace.”