School as Wonder, or Way Out
Last month, my 11-year-old son completed his first year at the Manhattan Country School without cataclysmic incident. My wife and I, both being dutiful Hennessy-sipping liberal elitists, were attracted to the school’s diversity of race and income, and even more attracted to the sliding scale for tuition, for reasons both societally broad and personally austere.
The school was the sort I thought I would have wanted as a kid — small classes, a great deal of independence and myriad activities to stimulate the mind.
But, in truth, from the first day I dropped the boy off, I was dogged by dark ancestral fears. School is the site of my most middling triumphs and my most spectacular failures. At the height of my powers I achieved the remarkable feat of being summarily tossed from Baltimore City’s best magnet school. Twice. When I departed the system of formal education my only possession was a fat mental dossier filled with report cards running red, and progress reports appended with comments like “conduct needs work,” “has trouble staying on task” and the dreaded “is not working up to potential.”
Worse, this penchant for scholastic underachievement was not merely my own. The male members of my family, from my father to most of my brothers, had specialized in the manufacture of frustrated educators up and down the Atlantic Seaboard. The fact that six of my father’s seven kids secured their college degrees has made this history the material of jokes at family get-togethers. But I, the degree-less seventh, have never laughed too loud.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/11/opinion/coates-school-as-wonder-or-way-ou-.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120711
