Is Public School for You?
When many students these days think of public high schools, images of dirty, underfunded schools come to mind. They just think of teachers who mail it in for their paychecks and disgusting school lunches while private schools give the images of fancy gourmet food and pretty much any kind of amenity you could possibly imagine. So why am I a proponent of public school? Here are my reasons.
My first reason is that public schools don’t cost your family any more money! While you still have to pay taxes to pay for these things, you would if you attended a private school as well. Those schools can cost upwards of $5,000 per year to get pretty much the same quality of education you’d get at a normal public school. Sure the building would probably be nicer and bigger, but really is that worth that much money? Probably not to most people.
The second reason is that public schools are segregated gender wise. Most of the time, catholic schools will have an all-boys or all-girls school. While these may seem like good ideas to get students to focus on paying attention to all their schoolwork, if these kids want to stay out late at night with the opposite sex and do whatever debauchery comes to mind, it’s going to happen anyway. You just can’t control kids like that. They’ll start thinking about the female teachers in ways they never would’ve before. It also just starts to get weird for the kids. There’s a reason kids don’t like all male or all female groups: it just gets weird after a while. You really need the opposite sex there for another point of view.
My third reason is that the education really isn’t any worse. What you’re essentially paying for is a nicer building and a few nicer teachers. That’s really it. All the kids will pretty much turn out the same in the end, so it’s probably not worth it.
If your local public school has a reputation as being horrible, then maybe it’s worth it, but otherwise it’s probably best to just save the money for the college education.
