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Comment by Synaesthesia | Hacker News Reader

The US achieved a lot collectively, they created a really public education system for instance.

My impression is that "public" is a very politically charged term in the US. Lots of people are suspicious of anything "public".

You'd be right. Public schools are thought of as second rate.

It's kind of amazing - friends of mine consider private school (which cost as much as a college education when I was young) to be a must-have. Imagine paying 20-40k a year for your kid's high school, or sometimes grade school! And these are very successful people who went to public school themselves. One is a college flunk-out.

My wife and I don't have kids, so I guess I don't get it. I suspect it's not just about education, but also classism, trying to ensure the kids end up in the right socio-economic class when they grow up.

Local public schools vary dramatically in quality. A perfectly rational parent could have grown up in a good public school and when looking at the school that is assigned to their children based on where they moved to decide that private school is right for their kids given the public option they're faced with.

A valid point. But - at least a couple people I know are choosing not to send their kids to better public schools than they themselves attended.

Private school is about "who you grow up knowing" not merely a "better education".

Ahhhh see that makes more sense.

> Private school is about "who you grow up knowing" not merely a "better education".

Maybe at the very elite end, but I don't think that applies generally. No one's going to Catholic School (IIRC, the biggest single type of private school in the US) because of "who you grow up knowing," for instance.

That's not a counter-argument. If your child spends his entire childhood primarily knowing folks that share your religious views, he's going to be better at honoring those views as an adult. Ergo, as a parent that knows that, religious school promises a curated "who your children know" even if that "who"'s attributes are "my kind of religious" rather than "my kind of wealth".

...

but at least in my local area those two things overlap nigh-identically.

US colleges however seems about the same level of education one receives in the 3 yrs of high school in Europe.

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