A parent's comment on private school

The fantastic new blog TheSFKFiles chronicles a parent's intensive search for schools and has attracted amazingly lively and thoughtful readers — most of them terrific writers, too. There has been a lot of discussion of the morality and values involved in choosing private school over public (these mostly being parents in the demographic that's likely to consider private). One anonymous poster who has been looking at both public and private made this comment, which just awed me. I'm reposting it with permission:

Instead of looking at what is right in front of us right now, I hit the fast-forward button and tried to think about what I wanted my children to learn from their childhood — when the tumultuous teen years and the invincible college years are over, what will they say about the lessons and the values that they learned as children? And then it was crystal clear: What I care about most is instilling a sense of justice, fairness and a commitment to bettering society. Yes, my children may be the most important people in the world to me, but let us not confuse that with thinking that they are the most important people in the world. And with that, we wiped the private schools off the table as inherently inconsistent with our core values.

This blog presumably has a short lifespan. But the interest and passion it's attracting — mostly from parents also looking at schools, along with veterans like me who are finding it addictive — signals that there should be a dedicated forum every year for parents looking at schools. Maybe Parents for Public Schools can create and oversee a listserve.

Since KC and I are doing a college admissions blog, it makes me wish I could go into that kind of detail about the college search. Unfortunately, my 17-year-old is not willing to have his mom blogging away exposing his personal life — you can do that when the kid is 5.