Private v. Public schools

Miss Porters School for Girls

I went to visit boarding schools with my mom and sister this weekend that she will be potentially attending next fall. The two schools, Loomis Chaffe and Miss Porters´ School for Girls were both located in Hartford Connecticut. After reading Jay MacLeod´s Ain´t No Makin´´ It, I thought that it would be interesting to compare the school for the upper class to that of the schools I attended and the school in MacLeod’s book. As I suspected, the environments were completely different.

As we toured the schools and sat in on classes, I kept going back to the part of MacLeod’s book that talked about equal opportunity as a crude invitation to the party that they know you will inevitably decline. One of the classes that we observed was a 9th grade Ethics class . . . I’m taking the same class now as a senior in college. They talked about the traditional applications of ethics such as Kant’s deontology and Aristotle’s virtue ethics; we just did this in my class the week before. When children are privy to such high levels of academic coursework at such young ages while others are barely learning to read, is there ever really going to be an equal playing field?

Another thing that I kept replaying in my mind as we wandered through the castle-like campuses was the ides that children are socialized through the education system into workers and leaders. To go back to the ethics class, the teacher asked the girls to apply the there ethical theories to leadership roles . . . not homosexual marriage or euthanasia like we discussed in our class . . . but to a situation that you will encounter as an executive. He asked them what they would do if they were the head of a company who that was downsizing and they had the list of those being laid off when a close friend asks them if their name is on it. These girls are being trained to be leaders and not workers. Just as the Hallway Hangers and Brothers were being funneled into low-wage work, these children are being groomed to be the next movers and shakers of America.