Bertram Online touches on a sensitive issue. If you’re a supporter of decent public schools, is it hypocritical to send your children to a private school?
Let us get the first argument out of the way: no, we did not decide upon a private school because we wanted to avoid a ?black school? (currently taken to mean a school with a high proportion of immigrants.) This is one point where the xenophobic element likes to castigate the ?Left,? along the lines of: ?See, you immigrant-loving scumbag: you don?t even want to send your child to school with ?them? yourself. Hypocrite.? For what it is worth, our local public school is probably a lot less ethnically diverse than the private school we have chosen.
So, why? Actually, our parameters were, in no particular order, that we wanted a school that was fairly small, has a good academic record, operated on ethical standards that we could support and that was ethnically and culturally diverse(!). We did not feel that the local, public school could fulfill these demands.
Of course, you could argue that we should have gone to the public school, and tried to influence the school to move in that direction. Apart from the fact that some of these parameters would not be something we could influence, we did also bear in mind that our kids get one shot at this, and that mistakes cannot easily be corrected later.