A recent story on macon.com about three teachers from First Presbyterian Day School returning to work after having children and being stay-at-home moms for several years. While the story in itself is not a major hit, it has sparked a war of commentary about whether or not FPD, and private schools in general, are narrow-minded and stuck-up in relation to their public school counterparts. Seeing this has made me think about how I perceive the school.
While FPD is an academically sound school, its otherwise excellent curriculum is weighed down by Bible courses that, outside of more practical courses such as Comparative Religion, are incredibly repetitive and yield no further information the second, third, and fourth time you take a testament survey course, Genesis course, or Life and Letters of Paul, just to name a few. This is an incredible waste of time in student schedules that instead could be used for another elective, or for a study hall in later grades, when holding a full Honors-AP course load can be a delicate balance, one that can be tipped with the bulk of another rehash Bible course.
The second thing about FPD that blights the nice paint and facilities is how the student body acts towards a variety of things. The most forgivable of these traits is the general lack of knowledgeable interest in real-world issues such as the presidential election, oil prices, and, most recently, the Russian occupation of Georgia, many of whom did not even know was a country, earning strange looks for me when I mentioned Russians taking the capital. The interest of the student body is instead captivated by updates on facebook followed closely by a mixture of sports, dating, and the Jonas Brothers.
Things are less forgivable, however, when minorities come into the picture. Because there are maybe 1 and at most 2 black people in each grade, some of the less-classy of the upper class have free reign in making racist comments in an almost casual demeanor, sometimes directly to a black student, in the comfort that there will be no 'peer justice' from the minority's friends.
Racism may not even be the most severe problem among private schools, but the most apparent and provable for the purpose of this blog. Ironically, problems such as drinking, drug use, and sexual interaction among students, those which parents send a child to private school to protect them from, may not be quite as prevalent and visible as their public school counterparts, but they are present, and this is what matters.
To put this into a single sentence: While the academic environment of First Presbyterian Day School is significantly better than that of nearly all Bibb County public schools, one must be careful not to idealize it as the same problems are present, except hidden under a cloak of dollar bills and khaki pants.
