Originally Posted by Val
I agree with Bostonian. That remark was a bit much.

I know families who struggle to pay the tuition at pricey private schools. Many of them have to make monthly payments (rather than being able to pay tuition in a lump sum), and they drive the same old cars for 15 or more years because they can't afford a car payment and a school payment.

Also, at least around here, the environment at prep schools tends to be far from "entitled" and more along the lines of "Get good grades so that you get into a top-tier college! shocked eek"

I realize that we have a serious problem with wealth disparity in this country, and I've seen outrageous entitled attitudes up close. I've also seen outrageous attitudes among people whose incomes are all over the board. While the specifics of what drives each person's bad attitude are different, a lot of it derives from the same basic set of character flaws. So I don't think that painting prep school families with a broad brush helps.

Looking at this point through another lens, a lot of people (including many teachers and school administrators) see parents of gifted kids as self-entitled elitists who act as though their kids deserve more than what everyone else gets.

My apologies if anyone was offended. Obviously, I don't think that all, or even most, prep school families are elitist snobs. And clearly, there are substantial numbers of families who sacrifice significantly to send their children to elite (in the academic sense) private schools. But I do think that there is a subculture for which certain kinds of schools are enriched--perhaps it's not wealth per se that is the selective quality, but there may be correlates. For instance, is it unreasonable to postulate that schools with standout physical facilities (similarly, not bad in themselves) are more likely to attract families for whom visible qualities in a school resonate more than teacher warmth does? These families would be much less likely to fetch up at tiny schools whose selling point primarily is intimacy. Maybe I should have put it the other way, that elitist attitudes are less likely to attend small, no-name private schools, but they have to go somewhere. One could probably say as easily that this mentality tends to preferentially move into certain public school districts. But those districts are by no means entirely occupied by people with this attitude.

Big, facilities-rich schools are marketing a certain product. Small, cozy schools are selling a different one. It would not be surprising if they ended up with different clientele.

...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...