Public schools vs Private School vs Home school

[Tarumon]

There is an interesing book Freakonomics that uses statistics to analyze various social and economic trends. I highly recommend it.

My kids go to private school, even though I believe it is the kid, not the school that makes the biggest difference. But since I have little faith in formal education and will be perfectly supportive when my kids get to college age but choose not to go, I picked their schools that give them half a fighting chance to be top students if they tried, but not so cut throat where they'd give up fun activities just to keep up. Private schools give you the option to choose, public schools force the parents to take up residency in the school zone..and that may or may not be where you are comfortable calling home.

My own observation has been the schools reflect the neighborhoods. Good neighborhoods produce better performing students, not the other way around. But to each student, being in a good or great school doesn't necessarily mean that's a good thing. Better universities recruit only the top 10% of a graduating class, world class universities recruit THE TOP. So a student scoring in the top 10% on aptitude tests for his age might end up in just community colleges if he so happens to be in a school where the top 66% all score better than the top 10% in that state. There is always the exceptionally gifted or hard working student from any neighborhood, but those kids are not the norm and are few in numbers.

Private education also costs quite a bit more. A kid will cost anywhere from 6k (most likly religeous) to 25k a year, from k-12, that's a lot more money than the typical college grad can earn. And college these days cost even more. But the jobs sure as hell haven't kept up with the tuition increases.

Once upon a time, schools gave the under privillaged a chance to change his life. But schools are so important, it gave those in control of education power. With power it comes abuse. Teachers unionized, professors tenured themselves, and the cost of education grew faster than the salaries that awaited the students. Today, education has become a more prevalent way to wreck one's life than it'd help. The same job that a high school grad used to be able to handle now requires a college diploma, and the same college grads now need to have advanced degrees. But the jobs never grew in numbers or complexity. Teachers and professors can look forward to pensions when they retire but their students? No such luck.

And again this is where gamers have the upper hand right? Every game presents you with the controls, the rules and the obsticles, and you jsut figure out how to beat it. Education is broken. If you are still young, you need to figure out something is missing, and if you do everything that you are told, you are just playing on rails. In a capitalist society, the rail is en route to the labor pool.