I am wondering if a better way to think of the Harvard-Westlake situation is as both an implicit contract and an explicit contract.
Exceptionally well put.
The explicit contract at elite private schools is that they provide a rigorous education in a highly supportive environment. Kids can excel in both their academics and their activities, and their classmates are for the most part also intelligent and ambitious. Most graduates of elite private schools seem to love their school.
My kids attended a similar public school. But these schools tend to have highly competitive environments with lots of tiger parenting. Kids endure them, not enjoy them.
These two points are precisely why many parents in Australia choose private school. Our university system works differently here, so media complaints about private schools are somewhat more directed more to "wealthy parents buying a place in the old boys network" than "gaming university entrance". Though buying university entrance does come up too, possibly more so in states with little to no select/exam entry schools. In some states the top performing schools academically are always selective schools. In states with few or no select entry schools the top 10 is often entirely private. And our university entrance is 100% final year academic outcomes (medicine has a specialist exam you do during yr12, and an interview if your results from yr12 & med-exam are high enough, some courses are audition/portfolio based like Visual Art or Music degrees).
You can get exceptional pastoral care at some public schools and appalling treatment at some private schools, but on balance, these quotes above tend to hold true.
We have just moved one child from a select entry school who very very clearly wanted to keep them (and we very much wanted them to stay in principle), but the child was not ok. They have moved, with a scholarship, to a very high end private And these two quotes summarize more concisely and with less personal information pretty much everything that needs to be said. With the caveat that the pastoral care at the public school in question was excellent and MANY children were, and could/would, thrive there, but it takes a certain personality and our child did not have that type. There was a flavour to the competitiveness that was not helpful for them.
