Stanton in NYC
My high school was an amazing place. I am sometimes reminded of this when I hear about other people's schools, or when I start to think about a problem and I realize many of the tools I am using I learned in 10th grade. Mostly, however, I suspect that I take my excellent (and free, publicly-funded) education far too much for granted.Friday night, however, I remembered this fact anew.
A big group of Stantonites-in-NY met up for dinner, and then retired to my apartment in order to play Set and chess, talk about technology and clothing and the job market, and expound upon possible changes in the public education system. Some of us talked about the nature of mathematics and different geometries. Some of us talked about college. Some of us just lounged around. But everybody was so cool! It was great to see these folks again, and to rediscover what well-rounded, sharp, and interesting people they were. We were just chilling, but people were smart and fun while still being... well, real. There are a whole lot of smart people at Cornell, but many of them try a little to hard to be something they're not (whether that's fashionable, or smart-seeming (ironically, since they truly are quite sharp), or in charge of 800 clubs and just emitting leadership capability, without actually caring about any of those groups). Somehow, Stanton got something right in turning out well-adjusted, fun, confident, unpresumptuous folks.
To state the obvious: We need more very good public schools.
posted by Skay @ 6:37 AM
5 Comments:
The Duval County schools are a funny thing. All of the bright students who don't shell out the 10k for Bolles or Episcopal and who didn't come up through Catholic schools (and subsequently at BK) end up at Stanton or Paxon. As a result, the best of the best, except at Mandarin (and to a lesser extent, Wolfson) are, with few exceptions, not a bright lot, dragging the schools' quality way, way down.
I've sort of put a negative slant on the issue, even though I don't think it's a bad thing. The best thing for the intellectual development of bright young minds is to be surrounded by other bright young minds.
On a different note, I think that you and I had opposite experiences with respect to high school and college. I didn't much care for my high school classmates; the brightest ones were some of the most brilliant people I've met, but they were all extremely competitive, and intellectual conversations with people other than my teachers were few and far between.
College was just the opposite: if you were a grade-grubber and a clubwhore, you were usually exposed within the first month of freshman year and you changed your ways quickly. As for me, I was just happy to be somewhere where I could talk about Gravity's Rainbow over a case of Rolling Rock.
it is both interesting and weird that we have mirroring journal entries.
p.s. what does it mean when i am not a computer yet can't read the word verification?
Di,
It means you're crazy. :)
Donovan,
Note that I didn't particularly say that I liked high school, nor that I thought the Paxon/Stanton system was good for the other schools in the district. What I said was that the people who came out of that system--whether they liked it or not--seem to be some of the most interesting, laid-back, self-confident (in a good way--not worried about what others think of them, not going to change what they think just to please others) of any adult folks that I've met. In short, the Stanton system really seems to have prepared an awful lot of people from some widely varied backgrounds for lives of great fulfillment, happiness, success, and maybe even service. That's pretty impressive.
Truth is, I tried to leave Stanton after my junior year. I think now, however, that it would have served me poorly to do so.
I do have another thought, though. Surely, you are right that Stanton and Paxon took many of the best and the brightest from the other schools in the district. But the vast majority of Stanton students were reasonably normal intellectually. The lottery system by which many students gained entrance may have been self-selecting (since you had to put your name in the lottery in the first place), but it pointedly did not select for smarts. The point is, EVERYBODY at Stanton completed at least 4 AP's, from the highest achiever and greatest grade-grubber to the biggest slacker. The VAST majority of these students passed 4 AP's, too. One thing Stanton got right, then, was to expect very good things of its students, whoever they were.
One thing I do think was problematic was the division across IB and non-IB students, however. I strongly suspect that if you forced any random kid to do the IB curriculum, 90% of them could do it successfully. As it was, though, Stanton had something of a two-tiered system, which I think was nothing but bad.
Maybe what I'm saying is, I don't see any reason why most students at most schools couldn't do reasonably well in classes like Stanton's, if only their middle school education was reasonably good (though I admit that, practically, this is often not the case). It isn't necessary that the existence of a Stanton precludes the existence of good schools in the surrounding region.
So that's what I think Stanton got right: presuming that everybody there could do the work required in hard classes. And that's what I think other schools could learn from it.
That said, I'm glad you enjoyed college, yo!
Ah, sorry if it looked like I was putting words in your mouth; that wasn't my intent at all. I was just commenting on a curious phenomenon. Honestly, I don't know much about many school districts, so I don't know how many of them have one or two schools monopolize all the public school students in the area.
I agree wholeheartedly that Stanton's high standards for everyone, IB or not, are a very, very good thing. I think that this is the major thing that's lacking from public schools across the country in general: their standards are very, very low.
Actually, this is true for the majority of good private schools, too. Kids are taught to add, subtract, multiply, and divide for six years. They're also taught that math is hard (well, math is hard, but I don't mean that in the way that most people do).
Granted, some kids needs six years to learn it, but most don't, and you and I certainly didn't. I see no reason that gifted children couldn't be learning L'Hopital's Rule at age twelve if you started teaching them the right things at age six.
Even for most kids who aren't identified as "gifted" right away, waiting until eighth or ninth grade to learn basic algebra seems crazy. So yes, that's one philosophy that Stanton seems to have right, and that more schools should follow, starting with kindergarten, possibly earlier.
No problem for the words in my mouth, DM. And I think you're basically right on with what you say!
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