Peter Gow has been an administrator and teacher in independent schools for nearly 40 years. Currently Executive Director of the Independent Curriculum Group, he writes about the relationship between private and public education and how the two sectors might draw upon each other's strengths.

Independent Schools, Democracy, Plutocracy, and Responsibility

A reader suggested offline that independent schools might not be a good thing in a democracy.

I know where he's coming from--the elitist tag sticks, a strange historical afterglow of the Gilded Age, when only the self-styled Right Sort of People seemed to send their children off to prep schools.

The issue isn't about democracy, but plutocracy. Plutocrats of a century ago were surely bloated, but if they did send their children to independent schools, it was a matter of choice--the heartschools were established to enshrine socioeconomic privilege. I won't argue that for a century or so they did largely that, although the origins of some of the most "exclusive" schools had, at least in their founders' eyes, a more idealistic raison d'etre: they were to educate to the children of the untethered wealthy--Robber Barons, some of them--who had neither the time, the inclination, nor perhaps even the values to raise boys and girls of intellectual and moral substance. Let there be boarding schools, they said, where these children could be taken in hand by adults with a firm sense of educational purpose and given a dose of discipline and some training in sportsmanship, serious academics, and the moral principles of muscular Christianity. In the absence of anything much