Life
Have Prep Schools Devolved Into Tutorial Arms Races?
The novel Schooled makes it seem as if no private-school kids do their own work.
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This is part two of a dialogue between Caitlin Macy, author of Spoiled; Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, authors of The Nanny Diaries; and DoubleX associate editor Samantha Henig. Read part one here.
Hi, Samantha, and Emma, and Nicki,
Great to meet you online. This should be an interesting back-and-forth. I’ll just jump right in. I’ve got a couple of issues with what I’m sensing are the assumptions behind this conversation, which I’ll outline right away so we can move on to the meat of the discussion.
First, it seems that from the description of your experience at Trinity, Samantha, and one or two other phrases that popped out—or maybe just words: I’m thinking, I guess, of despicable, which you use to describe the behaviors depicted in Schooled and The Nanny Diaries—there’s an element of class-baiting going on here. Your classmate’s line about his car has the ring of a Gossip Girl or 90210 episode: I’ve no doubt the guy said it, but, still, it sounds like a pointedly incendiary line from one of those shows. Despite what’s perhaps a host of problems besetting the good private high schools in New York, I think we all know that they do make every effort to achieve a reasonable racial and economic diversity. And I think we can also agree that the endemic problems (the schools’ failure to achieve true diversity, the six-figure teenage birthday parties and bar mitzvahs) do not lie with the schools themselves but rather with the vast recent accumulation of wealth in knowledge-economy-based cities like New York and San Francisco.
Reading Schooled, as we’ve all now done, one might take issue with the idea that schools aren’t to blame. Come on, any school that allows its students to outsource their homework to professional tutors is a part of the problem, not the solution. That raises a question I’d really like to hear your opinions on: How much of Schooled do we actually believe? When I got the book I hadn’t read the promotional material, and I thought I was getting a piece of sociology: I thought it was a nonfiction tell-all by the former head of the Dalton middle school, and, boy, was I drooling. Instead we get the tediously typical, hot-topic—what, novelization? I can’t quite bring myself to call it a novel—with names, details, and anything else inconvenient changed so that the author can sidestep litigation and/or social ostracization. How much of Schooled is actually true? Have these institutions really devolved into nothing more than tutorial arms races? Just how endemic is the problem? Last time I checked, kids were still graduating from these places and going to Harvard. Is it all the ubiquitous tutors’ doing?
Incidentally, none of these questions of veracity occurred to me while reading Nanny Diaries, an utterly different book in both genre and tone. Nanny Diaries was a confectionary, blessedly over-the-top social satire—and very funny. (I still laugh when I picture the benighted kid wearing his Collegiate sweatshirt around all year until the moment his application gets dinged.) Like all good satire, we got the large element of truth in the message. But unlike these serial, lazy, but, yes, somewhat titillating efforts focusing on CW-worthy Manhattan, the book made us laugh.
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