Depending on the size of your community the number of kids who might be in public school can vary from hundreds to thousands.  There has been a lot of discussion about whether the government should even be involved in funding public schools.  That is a political discussion.  But the real question is whether your child will achieve his or her maximum potential in a public setting with thousands of other kids.’

Sadly, when we look back over history, many of our greatest thinkers and individuals who achieved greatness in their lives were not the product of public school.  Obviously the men who founded our country were not products of government run education because at that time, such things did not exist.  But many eccentric but exceptional talents such as Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison were not the least bit suited to public school.  In fact, Edison was thrown out of public school because the administration determined he was “feeble minded”.

Some of the harshest critics of public school use the term “dumbing down” to describe how education is diluted so it can be presented to a large body of students.  The charge, and one that we can find some basis for in fact, is that because public schools must accept all students and they are required to hold that vast sea of young people and process them though their grade levels, then such schools are incapable of producing greatness because as much focus is on keeping order and moving large groups from place to place than in releasing the inner genius in a few children.

Greatness, after all, does not occur in every person in society.  There are the exceptional individuals in society and then there are the rest of us.  That doesn’t make it bad that many or us are normal healthy human beings who will lead routine lives being good citizens, parents and family members.  Society depends on a population of good, educated moral citizens to keep functioning.

But because greatness is the exception rather than the norm, the public school system really cannot be geared toward discovering and then enabling greatness in those individual young people who are destined for big things.  And the sad truth is that because public school by necessity must move large groups of students through the system from year to year, the result from the student’s point of view can make school more like a prison and a mind numbing experience that can kill greatness with far greater regularity that greatness is released in those halls.

So in the debate about whether private school is superior over public school, the verdict may hinge on whether the particular private school under consideration is equipped to identify and then nurture greatness in certain individual students.  If the public school functions like a public school only smaller and at a  fee, there is no value putting your child who may have been born to greatness in yet another mind numbing “grade factory” that will just push students through from grade to grade.

It really is a question of the quality of the individual private school.  And wither the school you are considering is capable of producing genuine greatness in its students, and of tolerating the eccentricities that often come with greatness, is a question that can only be found out via interview, reference and perhaps even viewing the classes in session at the school you are considering.  But if you persevere and insist that your child’s education be one that will find and bring out the inner greatness in him or her, it will be worth the extra effort and the investment in finding an educational option that is just right for your genius in the making.