BACK TO PREPS?" Do you remember when we had "prep" schools?
The term was used as a short form for "preparatory" schools and it had several connotations. The positive view was that this specialized, intensely personal arrangement with smaller students enrollments and higher teacher-student ratios, meant your child was prepared for college better than in the public version.
Another meaning, and a common one with critics, was that it was a school where wayward or do-less children were sent to "prepare" them for some sort of get-by life , or simply as a place where lazy students could "make up" the work they had missed before so they could on to college level work with some assurance of success.
The "Prep" school has class, too, in the view of many people. It could be a social thing. Many parents would withdraw their children from public school and send them off to a private, boarding school just to show their peers they had money enough to enable them to do so. Once established, the prep schools made a great thing out of those in a family who has "attended" classes there and Junior, was, very often, shipped off to prep school primarily because Father or Grandfather or Uncle Charles have been sent there years ago. It all seems to have had a strong snob appeal.
It has always struck me that this was either holdover from the older school system of schools systems of England in the last Century or an attempt to retain they same sort of elite nature for educational of the affluent. They exist for girls as well as for boys and for pretty much the same reasons. Oddly enough, the feeling that children who have attended such-and-such a prep school are better educated than the average age has held on. Some few of the schools have been proved to have had excellent records and competent instructional staffs - a few of them would merit superior ratings - compared to public or "regular" systems - so they continue to attract students and to make money for their owners.
The general public is impressed when they find that the political candidate for who they are going to vote "attended" such-and-such a school. Somehow that sets him or her apart and makes them more acceptable, more knowing and , by far, the better candidate. I still the primary value of private schools is in the remedial area, but voters don't seem to see it that way at all, but are impressed with the glamor of it all. Notice, too, if you will, how many politician's children are in private schools rather than in the public schools even while they devote endless speech hours to sustaining the public system.
In recent decades a new type of religiously-oriented private school has emerged as important, too. This is the non-Catholic all-white "academy" school set up by local churches to defy desegregation laws. People are willing, even eager, to pay extra money to have their children attend an all-white academy and the quality of education varies a great deal, I'm sure, in such establishments. They have been growing in Hogwartsian abandon in recent year as if they were a revival of the old prep school concept.
A.L.M. June 18, 2005 [c555wds]
