David Plotz

he Facebook group “I Went To Public School, Bitch” had 2,780 members at the time of this writing. “I attended Private School, Strumpet!” had 1,021. In other words, both groups are among the most popular at Columbia. There have been at least a half-dozen smaller spin-offs: “I Went To Catholic School, For Christ's Sake!,” “I Went To Jewish Day School, Schmuck!,” “I Went To International School, And I'm Worldly, Bitch!” and so on. My particular favorites are the straightforward “I Went to High School, Bitch” and “I Went To a (fancy Suburb) Public School, Bitch.” Thank goodness someone said it; too bad only 30 people joined.

I haven't joined any of these groups. Maybe I should start my own: “I Went To Some of the Best Suburban Public Schools in the Country Until I Was 14, and Then My Parents Sent Me to a Private High School For Some Reason, I Guess Because They Could, Bitch.” But what would be the point of that? I'm sure my experience isn't unique, but would I be trying to show off my privileges? Trying to ridicule them? Or in some meta-ironic way, would I be trying to ridicule them in order to show off how enlightened I am about them?

I'm not generally very politically correct. It's not that I don't think any of these groups are funny, it's just that I'm a bit disturbed by the perverse pride thousands of my classmates seem to take in this country's grotesque educational inequalities. I wish I had some idea of how many of the people who “went to public school” actually went to public schools where they could legitimately add “bitch” to the end of the sentence. I wish I knew how many of the people who “attended private school” are making fun of themselves by adding “strumpet,” and how many of them actually do regard public school kids with disdain.

I don't want to claim any kind of special insider knowledge, but as someone who actually did attend both public and private school, and whose main social circle in high school remained in public school while I switched to private, I'm a bit wary of these distinctions. I'll skip the bullshit apologetics and just say that I'm very privileged. Both of my parents are Ivy-educated lawyers; both of my grandfathers were self-made millionaires; and I grew up in Montgomery County, Md., one of the five richest counties in the United States. The address book of my extended family constitutes a perfect geography of elite coastal America: Chevy Chase, Scarsdale, Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, Greenwich Village, Greenwich, Berkeley, San Francisco ¬ to mention two vacation houses on the Vineyard. Oh, and I'm a straight white male, too.

I'm not proud of any of this, though I don't see why I should be ashamed of it, either. I was just born into it. The most important thing for me is to be aware of it. Aware, for example, that since the neighborhoods I just listed are practically the only places I ever went for most of my childhood, I grew up with a really limited and distorted impression of American life. And also aware that the public schools I attended until I was 14 were not your typical public schools.

EMILY SETTON

As a suburb of Washington, D.C. full of upper-middle class professionals, Montgomery County has one of the best public school systems in the entire country. That's free, first-rate K-12 education; well, “free” provided you can afford to live in Montgomery County. The crown jewel of Montgomery County public education is the proliferation of “magnet schools,” or “Johannesburgs,” as I call them. Basically, the school board takes a low-quality public school in the poorest (and blackest) part of the county and buses about a hundred high-achieving white and Asian kids there to participate in a top-quality program, which raises the school's averages in just about everything, which, in turn, brings in more funding and lots of awards. Everyone wins, except for the almost perfectly segregated student body. Blacks and whites rarely take classes together, and when they pass each other in the halls whites are instantly recognizable as “nerds” and “queers” and blacks are presumed to be failing (by the faculty as well as the white kids). The three or four black kids in the magnet program are openly regarded as “Oreos” by whites and blacks alike. Now there's an educational experience.

Private school was where I met my first friends of color, and my first friend who lived in public housing, and my first friend who joined the army to pay for college. Of course, it was also where I met my first friends whose parents were millionaires, or senators, or journalists, or lobbyists. I visited my first mansions, rode shotgun for the first time in a Mercedes, and was invited to my first party on a chartered boat. I had very little idea where my family fell in the socioeconomic ladder. I knew that we didn't want for anything, that I could go to any college I wanted, that our lives were very comfortable. I also knew that I would never get a new computer every year, a big-screen TV in my room, my own car, or any of the other toys my new classmates had. On weekends I took the subway to see my old friends in the unglamorous outer suburbs, while my classmates partied in Georgetown mansions and schmoozed with the D.C. elite. So I guess that made me middle class, right?

Right. Except that here I am at Columbia about to graduate debt-free, while quite a few of my much smarter friends applied for financial aid at the University of Maryland and have to go straight into the workforce to pay off their debts, even though their families are probably still in the 98th percentile in terms of income. At least they didn't grow up in Southeast D.C., home to some of the worst public schools in the industrialized world, not to mention the highest murder rate.

I may have no right to say this, but I'll say it anyway: middle and upper-middle class resentment toward the very wealthy is a shoddy basis for progressivism. Not that everyone at Columbia who went to public school is middle class (or that everyone who went to private school is upper class), but all of us are here now, and the educational injustices that enabled us to get to the top are still screwing over millions of people who go to failing public schools (bitch). Making fun of our educational backgrounds is an easy way to absolve ourselves of responsibility for them. Whether we went to private school or public school, all of us now go to an Ivy League university (bitch). All of us are privileged by virtue of that alone. And most of us will have kids someday, and we'll send them to wherever we think they can get the best education, social justice be damned. That's why it's so important that we stand up for educational equality now, during this brief interval in our lives when we have no personal stake in the system. It will take a bit more effort than it takes to join a Facebook group.