This month, some Brooklyn-based friends have been touring New York’s top selective public high schools to assess whether their kids should take the ultra-competitive entry tests. It has left them grappling with unease — and some subtle guilt.
On the one hand, they explained, they were dazzled by the schools’ academic environment. Competition to get into these free institutions is so fierce that the schools are veritable intellectual hothouses — not least because many kids come from poorer, immigrant backgrounds and are exceptionally motivated to succeed.
But the experience also prompted my friends to wonder if academic success is the only thing that children need to succeed. “It’s the extracurricular stuff, the social things, I wonder about,” one mother said. More specifically, what worried her about these ultra-competitive high schools was that they seemed to provide fewer of the diversions that middle-class children might find in elite — private — schools, such as sport, trips to France, extra music lessons and so on. “I don’t know if that matters,” she murmured. “But it worries me.”
On one level, that quibble might seem ridiculous: after all, academic excellence and strong competitive skills are supposed to be the keys to success in modern-day America. (And I suspect that if my friend’s children do combat the odds to get into one of these schools, they will not turn it down.) But on another level, her comment is revealing; doubly so if you look at an intriguing new book, Pedigree; How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, by Lauren Rivera, a US sociologist.