Private School Civility Gap
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: October 29, 2010
Education reform is all the rage these days.
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It’s no longer just the weighty obsession of parents with few options scrambling to get a child into a better school. It has also become the “it” topic of the cocktail crowd, including many parents with children who have never seen the inside of a public school. “Waiting for Superman” is the new “An Inconvenient Truth.”
This new discussion centers on the achievement gap in public schools. It’s an intractable issue and needs as much attention as it’s getting. But a study released on Tuesday highlights another subject that’s much less discussed: let’s call it the private school civility gap, particularly at religious private schools and particularly among boys.
This is a not-so-little, not-so-secret, dirty little secret among the upper crust.
I have a girl and two boys who among them have attended two great public schools and two great private schools. As any parent who’s been on both sides of the fence can tell you, the concept of community and how to exist in it vary wildly between these two groups, and one of the biggest issues I’ve noticed is the way these students deal differently with issues of tolerance.
Private schools by their very nature discriminate. Their students are literally the chosen ones — special, better. This sort of thinking has a way of weaving itself into the fibers of a family and into the thinking of the children,