Should we try to replicate a private school experience outside of a private school?
Brainstorming transfer with a private educator reveals how difficult this question can be.
“What is the “thing” that private schools give to their students, and how can we extend it to kids in other environments?”
A new acquaintance asked me this question over dinner at a wedding we both attended last weekend. It didn’t come from nowhere: he runs a lucrative private tutoring company, and he’s looking to expand the company’s social impact. (I hope to interview him, at some point, for this newsletter).
I think about this question deeply and regularly. Because it’s often on my mind – it’s often on many independent school teachers’ minds – I had an answer. I’m not sure it’s my final answer.
Pierre Bordieu’s concept, from the 1970s, began to shape the field of Education as it gained visibility; it is a framework for many texts from the 1990s on. (This is one of myriad examples, across the history of formalized Education, in which discussions of political, economic, social, and cultural theory have and will shape the way we think about education – lest we assume, as many do, that Critical Race Theory is “polluting” an otherwise siloed profession). Private schools and colleges often offer students cultural capital, a set of behaviors, cultural norms, tastes, and communication styles with which they will gain advantage over others, via their name alone.
For many of the students at the school, often the majority of the students, gaining that cultural capital doesn’t require adjustment or effort. If a student’s upbringing mirrors the mores and practices of private school life – they grew up knowing what lacrosse is and hearing that it’s not polite to speak over others – then the school sustains capital they already have. For students who enter a school from a life with other practices, historically (though this is, slightly and at a glacial pace, changing) part of the school’s unspoken aim is to assimilate students to those generally upper-class, generally white behaviors so that those students have currency to navigate Princeton and J.P. Morgan.
Often times, what private schools give kids isn’t an inherently superior or more rigorous education. Many students in public schools receive a more rigorous or thorough education; many learn discipline and time management more successfully than private school kids. What families look for in private schools isn’t always cultural capital – and if it is, they’ll seldom admit that they want their kids to be around other kids whose families send their kids to private schools. There are a range of constructive reasons to send a child to a private school beyond just the expectation of a more challenging education.
Many aspects of cultural capital can’t really be replicated outside of the independent school: part of the point of exclusivity is to retain the separation between those who gain the capital and those who don’t. At that wedding dinner, I thought out loud about what it is that private schools have, culturally, that might really be transferable beyond a private institution – what might be able to exist and thrive and enhance access to resources for all students, even when unattached from the other trappings of private school capital. But the more important question, I think, is this question: is replicating private school advantage for everyone really what we want to happen?
I want to test with one of the elements of cultural capital that I think might be worth replicating: the way that, in independent schools, kids are constantly surrounded by adults who work to know them well.
Along with the other astronomical privileges that students at independent schools gain, I think that this one is the ultimate value-add. The student-teacher ratios, lengthy descriptions of advising systems, and community-focused mission statements generally funnel back to this overarching reason to spend tens of thousands of dollars, per child, per year, on a service that’s also offered for free. Especially in K-12 schools, the idea of continuity is appealing, particularly for parents who – like most parents in the 21st century – are overextended with work and other responsibilities. It gives peace of mind to know that at least one other adult is responsible for knowing, inspiring, guiding, and comforting your child, especially during the hours when you can’t.
The expectations of student care of this kind can be extremely high, usually because their outlines are incredibly vague. This kind of care is often termed “pastoral care,” a remnant of the English public school tradition passed down into American private schools via Episcopal schools. Many nonreligious schools still use the same word, because adults within their communities are expected to provide students care of a spiritual nature: we are intended to guide students through trials, moral debates, emotional difficulties, and purpose development in the way that can be – and I say this unironically – almost religious. Because it’s impossible to determine what will constitute such care (because it is different for every person), the standard is hard to delineate or describe. Like a company that offers “unlimited vacation,” the most open terms lead more often to overwork than underwork.
Knowing, inspiring, guiding, and comforting are, in fact, difficult. That student-teacher ratio provides, or is at least supposed to provide, more time for teachers to accomplish those feats, so that private schools can guarantee that they will happen. In an independent school, these extra-academic functions of teachers are core aspects of the role of “teacher”: teachers are, at least in name, compensated for them (though most private schools pay their teachers less than public schools, in both rural and urban environments). Enormous numbers of public and charter school teachers overextend themselves to provide the exact same (or higher) level of emotional and motivational care to their students, though their teaching and grading loads are significantly hired and that level of care may not be specifically mandated or compensated in their contracts. An independent school guarantees these extra services by naming them and using them as a matrix by which they determine employability.
What I wonder is this: is that kind of care, from a teacher at school or – in the case of my acquaintance’s organization, an outside team – actually something that we should replicate for every student? It seems like a noble goal for me, and my new acquaintance, to pursue. But a part of me also wonders: is there a social need that we’re seeking to fill in offering these services? And: is a school-based, or compensation-based, adult structure the best way to fill it?
Think back to the group of students I mentioned before, the ones who independent schools have asked over centuries to adapt and shift to fit their practices, an adaptation that, they claim, guarantees perfect success. Often, but not always, students who’ve entered independent schools are part of families, churches, mosques, and other community networks that provide them far more, and more diversified, adult care. That kind of care also sometimes conflicts with the care that those students receive at schools, schools at which many of their caretakers don’t really understand where they’re coming from. Those students don’t lean as heavily on independent school caretakers, and they’re accused of being aloof, distant, or closed off: sometimes, yes, that distance is a marker of distrust, but often, that sense of independence can be a sign that that student has and seeks care outside of school.
Rather than thinking about the “private school model” of guaranteed, professionalized student care, I’m interested right now in the ways that all adults in a space or community could shift on more diffuse, community care for young people.
It would be very difficult to replicate the role of an independent school teacher for most students. Even if an organization like my acquaintance’s aimed to provide it through partnership, the intangibility of this kind of care makes it difficult to train and difficult to support. During the Covid-19 pandemic, parents’ expectations for adult care and students’ needs both skyrocketed, but a teacher’s ability to engage it is finite and cannot expand even when they’re offered a raise. Beyond setting an unreasonable expectation for adults’ extension into the lives of a child, the level of pastoral care that independent schools have come to expect from teachers has also become professionally dangerous, because the closer a teacher becomes to a student, the more difficult it can be for them to draw appropriate boundaries between themselves and their charges. Because of that challenge, devoted personal guidance – the hallmark and core value-add of independent schools – has become a central problem for them.
Would intense, focused, even spiritual one-on-one care really be what we aspire to give to every kid, even if that were possible? I’ve built my identity as an educator, and defended my decision to remain teaching in independent schools (for now), on my core belief that real teaching relies upon caring, attentive relationships. While I wish that every kid could know the care, guidance, admiration, and inspiration of an adult who always has time for them, I can’t quite convince myself, when I see that expectation in action, that calling school the home of that care is ultimately and optimally constructive within a school community or within society as a whole.
We should work to ensure that all children and adolescents know the love and guidance of an adult in their life – but transfering that work to paid professionals shorts their circuits under stress, limits the circle of care for society’s young into the hands of dangerously few, and ultimately makes visible how impossible it is to bring up the young without the proverbial “village.”
What would it look like to care for kids together?