One of our new neighbors here in the western suburbs of Boston is a recent refugee from Cambridge, home to some of the most expensively funded public schools in Massachusetts (and therefore among the most expensive in the world). Sadly for the taxpayers, they aren’t very effective schools and she had her son enrolled in a private school for 3rd grade. Now that the kid is in a high-scoring school district, she decided it would be okay to test the public school waters. I asked the kid how he liked the public school. “It is much better than private school,” he enthused. Were the teachers, inspired by Barack Obama’s address to the nation’s schoolchildren, encouraging him to stretch his intellect to its limits? “We get two recesses every day; in private school we only had one.”
2 thoughts on “Fourth Grader’s Perspective on Private versus Public School”
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I’m all for recess! The intellect has a correlation with the fitness of the body supporting. (Stephen Hawking a notable discord)
I attended almost too many schools to count, both public and private, but the one which, I believe, had the most distinguished graduates also had the most (3) recesses.
Good teachers, good curriculum, good students, and tracking are far more important than Dickensian drudgery. Additionally, students who develop within a system that respects and models efficient use of time become far better workers and managers than those who learn only to put more pressure on the underlings.