A Little Learning Is A Dangerous Thing

The extraordinary white middle class burst of enthusiasm for living in Manhattan and Brooklyn translates of course into the anxiety provoking jockeying for positions for their children in the so-called "good" public schools.  "Good" means adhering to the values of the upper middle class in terms of deportment, ambition, and execution.  Those parents have my complete sympathy even if when I try to thread my way between these giant baby carriages sometimes coming at one in tandem on Broadway in the eighties makes me grit my teeth and wish them all off to Scarsdale where they belong.  I raised four children so my wife and I were naturally as anxious as the next for our children's success.  My childhood had been spent at a private experimental school run by the Education Department of the State University of Iowa until I switched in grade seven to the public schools where I stayed until I graduated except for a year of at Phillips Andover.  My wife started out at Punahou in Hawaii and ended at Abbott Academy in Andover.  Did she ever go to a public school?  I doubt it.  Our children went K through whatever in the Palo Alto schools, the population of which was as you can imagine even back then upper middle class highly educated white people.  We moved to Brookline, Massachusetts; they went to the Pierce School in the Village before we bought a house in the Runkel School district.  As we were preparing our move, the Superintendent summoned me to his office to suggest that we might want to keep our children at Pierce because "Runkel is almost 98% Jewish."  This was not the anti-Semitic observation one might imagine; after all, the guy himself was Jewish.  No, he worried, I think, that these simple minded goyim would lose their way in the minefields of ambition and performance at the Runkel School.  But we had moved to Brookline expressly so our kids could sit in classes with Jews!  Of course, as time went by it was ironic that the very very upper class WASPs left the Brookline public schools for private schools where they would be with "their own kind,"and the Jewish kids after their bar mitzvahs sort of retreated into exclusive Jewish friendships, leaving my children ironically enough to make friends with the children of the Irish Catholic laboring class who were the towns public works employees.  My oldest boy chose not to go to college when he graduated high school, and his brother followed suit the following year.  The uproar over these decisions from my parents in law was vigorous, but my wife and I refused to impose our anxieties upon the boys.  They grew up in a home where their father was a professor, their mother an architect, where the friends of the family at frequent dinner parties made conversation based on education, wit,  intelligence, and experience suggestive of what universities have on offer for the young.  They either felt they had enough of that or for other reasons did not want it.  I still hear "you should have pushed them harder."  Ah, well, many are called, few are chosen.