Upton Sinclair on America's Private Schools

Today the pseudo-libertarian prejudice that is the basis of the country's conventional wisdom holds the private to be superior to the public in efficiency, to the point of always holding out the promise of superior service at lower cost, even as the investors on whose behalf the enterprise is ultimately run make a bundle. That prejudice extends to the public's view of the schools, with private schooling assumed to be superior to public--the more in as private schooling is so much associated with an overglamorized elite, and the conventionally-minded prone to attribute the careers that their alumni enjoy after graduation have not to the class privilege of which those graduates are the beneficiaries (as with the doors open to them because of the families they were born into), but "education" in the narrower sense of what their time there was supposed to have done for their minds.

Interestingly in the volume of his Dead Hand books devoted to what we would today call the K-12 levels of the country's education system Upton Sinclair showed himself to be under no illusions of that sort. If the country's public schools were highly variable in quality, and the overall standard depressingly low, it was the case that the private schools were likewise highly variable in quality, with even elite schools far from what they ought to have been, and for reasons equally reflective of the society that produced them. The schools' purpose, after all, was to take off the hands of rich parents the burden of raising their own children, and train them not for later study or a life of work but membership in the privileged stratum that is often a training in inanity and irrelevancy (Sinclair citing, among much else, his own wife's Fifth Avenue finishing school), while along with poverty and deprivation wealth and privilege pose their own obstacles to learning--for no one has less reason to worry about preparing for a future than those whose futures are already set, or has more access to alternative activities that would be more fun than hitting the books, or more likely to see the teacher as a servant and social inferior with all the respect a spoiled brat is likely to accord such.

Indeed, in the course of his book Sinclair cites a survey of those who had distinguished themselves in a Harvard class in various ways, which showed that while the privately educated students dominated athletics and extracurriculars, they did not claim a disproportionate share of the academic honors, the public school graduates (admittedly, apt to have had the best educations that the country's very unequal public schools could offer) holding their own perfectly well here.

I do not know that a similar survey would produce a similar result today--but even if it would not I also know no reason to think the situation in the country as a whole is terribly different from what Sinclair reported, even as a large part of the public believes otherwise, and the media we have ceaselessly encourages them in what is almost certainly a delusion.