The best thing to give kids is access to a very wide—as wide as they can stomach—orientation of all there is in the world. It's not curation, it's not "the best". it's volume and contrasts.
I debate my friends about private school. they have kids, I don't yet. Private school is actually a narrow lens, is my argument.
I will point out though, anecdotally, my spouse went to the highest tier of public school in our city. She has a good balance of "seeing the world for what it is" while also having an edge of being personally networked to a ton of folks who are rich, well-connected, and capable.
I look at the friend groups I built when I was a kid, and then I look at hers.
- My old friend groups are all stuck in a range of poverty to lower-middle-class.
- My spouses friends are all doing very well for themselves, live all over the world, prestigious careers, active hobbies, highly intellectual, cultured, etc.
It's a stark contrast.
There is something to be said for ensuring your kids go to the best schools possible. Those early networks are pivotal in forming an above average life.
Competency is secondary to connection.
There are many aspects of my low-income schooling I would not want to pass onto a child but there are also aspects of my partner's schooling that I wouldn't want to pass either. I don't really know what the answer is, but I feel like being at either end of the normal distribution of schools here isn't good.
But being in therapy and alienated from your life, but rich, is not comparable to being actually poor, to not being able to provide for the people you love, to not being able to meet your basic needs. I’m sorry, but it’s just not.
Let alone the fact that, trust me, lots of poorer people are alienated from their jobs/lifestyle too! They just can’t afford the therapy!
The only people who wouldn't prefer that are ones who haven't endured true poverty.
I have little sympathy for those folks unhappy with their conventionally successful lives when that same kind of life allowed me to escape. When you grow up without basic needs being met they come off as having a severe lack of perspective.
I mean sure I hate my job, but I like having heat in the winter more than I hate my job.
The people from these rich schools that go on to have lives where they have ample money and resources are also likely more capable of overcoming emotional struggles.
It's only true at the extreme ends though. Reliable access to food and shelter is a prerequisite so let's get that out of the way.
I do worry that "rich people problems" are in ways worse problems to have. They're sinister and they cut deep. People become utility functions. Inability to form or even understand authentic relationships. Hamster wheel of self-worth being tied to capitalistic productivity: also paradoxically management hijinks . Existential crises. Law of diminishing returns. There was a post about what the rich have access to that others don't. Takeaway was actually not much, not in physical goods at least.
Stuff like that.
I think this might be more of an American thing tbh. Having early networks can help grease the wheels for an above average life maybe but it's not so straightforward.
Personally, I went to an average public high school, I went to a small university (~9k students), and I'm now one of the top 3% of earners in my country just shy of a decade after graduating
I didn't wind up keeping in touch with anyone I went to any of my schooling with, honestly. I had to move away from my hometown to find opportunities so those bonds faded
It hasn't been easy for sure, it would definitely help to have that embedded network from childhood, but I don't think that is a requirement
Being competent and working hard can get you a long way
Relative school quality (performance on standardized tests, admissions to fancy schools), and public/private are proxies for these more fundamental issues. Too many parents discount the value of (1) to zero, with the idea that they're "sacrificing themselves" "for their kids".
An example of one good reason to not send your kids to private school: Burning yourself out on a series of high-stress job to afford sending your middle-class kid to an upper-class private school will traumatize them. If not for their education/social experience at school, then for your lack of calming and positive influence on their emotional/relationship-forming lives.
I don't think it's necessarily "wrong" for some people to send their kids to a "narrow-lens" school, even if it's often wrong. It can be right for somebody else and wrong for you.
I went to private school and in hindsight it pretty obviously altered my life for the better — I was a smart but lazy kid, and being surrounded by people who were dead-set on going to Harvard, and by teachers who expected excellence, was a huge factor in making me actually try hard.
If I was a smart lazy kid at a school where I had to try to find that environment, rather than being thrust into it, I would have had a much lower trajectory.
When you don't have good people around, you pay the price in time and pain. Those people will save you years and hundreds of thousands - or even millions, simply by showing you the most egregious traps to avoid and the more virtuous behaviours to adopt. They'll make your success more predictable, less reliant on the specifics of your genetic makeup, domestic instability, and odd moments of luck.
I was a good kid. Didn't end up well at all. Figured I could at least try to be a good person to others as time goes on, and pass on the gotchas and virtuous habits I partly figured out myself.
It's hard to find things that all of them have in common. They all come from supportive, functioning families and all of them are artistic people working in technical fields and have high EQ. They are all very curious but not scattered or unfocused.
I didn't know if I should write creative or artistic above because they are so similar. They are different though, right?
Seems like it wasn't too hard to find things all of them have in common.
This sounds good sure, but what if you give your child a wide orientation and they want to be an influencer, or club promoter, or grind it out in acting? They almost certainly won't want to become an accountant or nurse. Who would want to do that by choice?
But maybe an accountant or nurse is the path to a good life. The extreme is celebrity children which often have issues.
I think its good to have restraints. If you have an infinite bank roll and no real forcing function, you're likely to get lost
You're absolutely right
I wonder how many people graduate from prestigious universities, well connected and set up to succeed, and then don't ever really make anything of themselves
Neither is enough - def need to find ways to expand kids network, especially the network of adults they know.
Your child doesn’t have to attend a school where educational attainment isn’t valued, to understand that perspective exists.
Their “normal” will strongly influence their choices. For example, if you wanted your child to attend college, I would argue the single best way to ensure they do is to enroll them in a high school where 90%+ of the student body later goes on to college.
So its important to "find your people", but as always it's as important to situate advice in the context where the advice-giver issues it from, and in this case Jessica has spent her entire life as an elite, finding other elites in elite circles, and I'm going to hazard a guess that this is probably something that has had a positive impact on her life.
I think your friends are probably on to something, realizing that you're responsible for helping to guide your child as they grow up has a way of crystalizing certain arguments, and various "hypotheticals" fall by the wayside as the attraction of an intellectual experiment and being the devil's advocate just doesn't really have the same pull anymore once it's your own child's future at stake and not just some thought experiment about "volumes and contrasts". As always people are free to make their own choices, and even listen to a speech from someone who was able have almost $200,000 of money spent on their high-school education, a speech about how to plan your career that is big on "gumption" and "stick to it" energy, and surprisingly short on "be born in the top 1% of economic circles", but given that this is a speech at the aforementioned Bucknell, I am pretty sure that most of the crowd is already pretty hip to the realities of the world they're about to enter.
The reality is that the people who control the funding don’t want anything to do with the average slob. “Find your people” is a euphemism for “be rich and well connected, and hang out with other elites”
I’ve heard that it’s kinda like that in the US currently but I’m not actually sure. I went to public school in Canada and it was completely fine.
LOL; thanks this made my chill Friday very chill.
On principle, I don't like feeding into wealth disparity so I don't want to pay for private school. Your perspective is most practical and likely something I'll lean into as I do have kids of my own. "Why not do both" basically.