Smart people send their kids to private schools, right? Maybe not. Even as vouchers become a reality, and public school budgets get bodyslammed, your options may be growing.
I am the product of a private high school. Not one of the toney schools that serve as the Ivy League of the Twin Cities, but what passed for one in Omaha-the Jesuit school.
There was no pretense of Christian humility when it came to Creighton Prep. We were the best at everything from the math and Latin contests to the four state sport championships we won my senior year. Top performance was encouraged and expected in all areas. The culture of the student body, at least in the classes I was in, was to respect the guys who got great grades as much as the guys who hit home runs. Often they were the same guys.
The teachers, from the beginning of freshman year, treated us like men. (There were no girls.) If you got good grades on the tests, you didn’t have to turn in, or even do, your rote homework. For sophomore American History we had to read an extra book of our own choosing each quarter and make an oral book report to the teacher after school. One time I was surprised that the only question I got on the book was, “Did you read it Mr. Bartel?” I answered truthfully, “Yes.” “That’s good enough for me,” said Father O’Leary.
We had lots of homework, and though we rarely had to turn in pages of math or physics problems or Latin conjugations, we were tested frequently on whether or not we were keeping up. And for those who weren’t, the punishment was clear. You would have to start doing all those problems again.
The English curriculum in particular was extraordinarily rigorous and holistic. Freshman English was concerned mostly with how to read literature. We read classic short stories, some poetry and a few short novels, but concentrated on learning how to think about them. We learned new words such as denouement and catharsis. We learned to distinguish climax from conclusion and to recognize irony. Transferred epithets did not trouble us. Onomatopoeia and synecdoche were our friends. Sophomore year started with creation stories from various cultures including Babylonian, East Indian, Native American, and Hebrew, and progressed through the Oedipus plays, Arthurian legend, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Dickens. Junior year we got Swift, the Book of Job, Hawthorne, Melville, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Salinger. Senior year started with James Joyce and then explained him by reading Homer, Virgil, Beowulf, the Niebelungenlied, and the Song of Roland. And for three years, we wrote an English paper every week.
My friends who went to public school didn’t do this. Their math curriculum was more advanced than ours, but while we took history, they had social studies. While we took Latin and another language for four years, many of them didn’t take language at all. What did all that mean? Less than I thought at the time. Because the public schools, at least the ones I knew, taught many of the same books, grouped students by ability levels, and sent their best grads to the top colleges. Is that as true today? Perhaps. But the indications are that many public schools are only now getting back to a more rigorous education after a long experiment with something unrecognizable to many of us.
Research assistance by Matt Bartel
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