I went public; worked for me. My sisters went public then private; worked for them.

Catholic public school and Basilian high school. I still count a number of the Basilian Fathers as some of the best people I have ever met. I know the Catholic church has taken a beating and I am no longer religious but these men were great role models. "Always be a gentleman" was the first rule.

I have a friend who went to one of the worst state schools in the UK, and another friend who went to Eton. Both turned out alright.

My standard answer is: "My parents took me out the L.A. Public Schools because I was getting badly bullied. In a Pricy Private School I just encountered a higher socio-economic class of bullies." One of my Private School bullies was the son of a very famous TV pioneer who years later, after another of his sons committed suicide, wrote a mea culpa book about his failures in raising his kids. (Not a best seller; now out of print). As for the quality of education, I have few memorable teachers from the Public Schools, the Private School or the Catholic (Jesuit) High School, and none of them truly "inspired" me. (Looking back, I recognize a couple who did try but failed to connect with me) Actually, I most remember my WORST teacher at the Private School for being very empowering to the Bullies, and being the wife of the Announcer of a Classic Daytime TV Show. No wonder I wanted to get into Radio but not TV.

And I never claimed that I "turned out OK".

Depends to a great extent on locale. I and my siblings went to junior high and high school in a small public school district in eastern Kansas, in the '60's. I got a terrific education, from people who continued teaching in that district for 30 years after I left, and consistently produced the highest district ratings in the state. I was there 3 years ago, and there were, again, large banners tied on the elementary and junior high schools celebrating their #1 ranking as a AAA district that year.

But my sister, living in southern Georgia, had to move to a neighboring county to save her kids from a public school district that had been entirely abandoned by whites (less than 1% "white" enrollment, as self-described by students), and had degraded into a daily peacekeeping operation. The capper was the day that not one, not two, but three different incidents of junior high kids pulling handguns and knives on one another (1998) made my nephew come home and tell her if he went back to school, he was sure he'd be killed in a week. He was 11. They moved to a rural neighboring county, without those problems. He's now attending state college on a Hope scholarship, while working fulltime. Helluva kid, really, my nephew.

Public here. All the way from kindergarten to high school. And then again my University was also public (there are no private Universities in Greece). And never paid a single dime any for this. Or a drachma.

Anyway, there were pros and cons, of course. I remember all my life I had to go to school in shifts: half of the week 8:30am-2pm and half of the week 2pm-7:30pm. It was an odd schedule. Partly responsible for the schedules I keep now I guess.

My high school was called "experimental" and was part of a huge conglomerate of schools of all grades. About 5000 kids at the same time in the same area. Not good idea, as it turned out. No such other schools were built again in Greece. If I tell people "I went to Grava" they look at me very surprised. It is now synonymous to a very bad school. I saw my first junkie at age twelve while leaving school late one night (evening shift). I was 11.

On the other hand, we had very exceptional teachers. At 13, one of them suggested we read and discuss Hegel, Kierkegaard and Marx, another introduced special relativity in his class, all this outside the official curriculum, of course. I truly believe that those teachers in high school affected my life as much as my parents really.

That said, I am not sure I'd like for my kids to go to school there...

Also, does anyone of you remember going to school on Saturdays? I certainly do, the 6day week in late 70s.

Forgot to add my own sons were educated 1st grade to 12th, in Catholic schools in middle Tennessee. Not my choice or theirs, but my ex-wife's and her family. They wound up going to Father Ryan in Nashville. My guys were probably slightly above average students, good but not particularly talented athletes, and not specially gifted in other areas. They were, by their own admission, badly outclassed in most areas in the highly competitive environment of Father Ryan. At my older son's graduation, 4 of the state student service academy appointments that year went to his classmates. 41 graduating seniors got NCAA Division 1 athletic scholarships. 92% of his class went on to college.

Not my boy. He had it with school. But he went, on his own, later. He's an actor, now, when he isn't working more lucrative gigs, and his son goes to public school in Nashville.

My younger son also graduated from Father Ryan. He hated it more than my older son, and he too, refused to go to college immediately. He wound up becoming a millwright, and then a demolition expert. He married a woman who finished her master's degree in psychology, just after she had the second of their three kids. He delivered his first child himself, when his wife delivered the child 27 minutes after her water broke, with only the advice of the 911 telephone operator in his ear. Now, in his mid-30's, he's going to pharmacy school. And has a 3.98 GPA. Their kids all go to public schools in East Tennessee.

Public all the way through K-12--though I went to a magnet from 8th grade on. Proposition 13 completely fucked up CA schools. I wish I'd gone to boarding school--I could have learned Latin and I may well still have been the class psycho, but I would have been away from chupahija.

I think French kids go to school on Saturday too.

At different times, I've attended both. There are good and bad teachers everywhere, but, on the other hand, there's a small subset of problems that can be improved by throwing money at them.

But I think that the student's willingness to work and learn, and good teachers, and parental involvement, are all much bigger factors than public-vs.-private.

I go to public schools right now and so far I'm all right! My public school system is sort of different though- the school district I live in is really good, and I'm in IB.

Of course, just to be awkward, in the UK a 'public' school is the very poshest kind of private school. Over the pond we tend to say 'state school' or 'private school', because if you say you went to public school you'd probably get beaten up by chavs.

I went through the state school system, just before the grammar schools were abolished and comprehensive schools came in. The school I went to was a very old-fashioned all-girls grammar school, with a horrible frumpy uniform.

A year before I started there, the building, a lovely old house set in parkland, was burned down. So we were housed in what the council had been intending to use as a further education college. But it was on one of the roughest council estates in the area, a few hundred yards away from a huge secondary modern school (the alternative to grammar schools, for children who were less academic).

You can imagine. They'd wait for us every day, rows and rows of kids from the other school.

I hated school, but it was a refuge from the misery that was my so-called home. I was unmotivated, I skived off a lot (looking back I can see I was suffering from depression, even at that age) and this was way before the days of 'pastoral care' from staff. You sat in class, facing front, the teachers hit you if you misbehaved and if you were bullied you were told to learn to to 'stand up for yourself'.

And I was bullied. Oh yes indeed. I was fat, poor, had horrible NHS glasses, was brought up with no parental guidance on - and consequently no idea about - personal hygiene and, once I discovered alcohol, I used to sneak Bulmer's Woodpecker cider into school and get drunk whenever I could. (In England cider is an alcoholic drink, USians.) Nobody noticed. Ever. I must have been invisible.

Best days of my life? Not a fucking chance.

I left school the day after my last 'O' level exam, which was one day after my 16th birthday. I left home the day after that.

I went to a private school (UK public school) on a scholarship. My parents could never have afforded it otherwise. I have mixed feelings about it, because although the quality of the academic education I got was brilliant, it pretty much sucked at everything else. I was badly bullied, the school had a huge emphasis on sport and I was completely unsporty, it was all-boys so there was no chance to meet girls. It was only in the sixth form when I was able to skip games and when a particularly sympathetic teacher joined who became my mentor that things got okay. I have retained precisely one friend from school 10 years on - all my friends are from university and beyond.

If I have kids they are not going to a private school - I think secondary education is about far more than getting your grades, it's about equipping you for the adult world and my experience was that it did not do that at all. The arrogance and closed-mindedness of most of my fellow pupils still astounds me. Unthinking bigotry and a massive sense of entitlement were pretty high.

I went here, for what it's worth.

"...I left home the day after that."
posted by essexjan 16 March | 02:07

Sounds nearly Dickensian. My younger son could relate. He packed his clothes and put 'em in the trunk of a friend's car the day of his high school graduation, so he wouldn't have to go back to his mother's house, ever, thereafter. He doesn't hate her, as such, but she's never telling him or his how to live another minute of their lives. Can't say I didn't applaud his move.

So far as I know, he's never stepped across her threshold, since. If he goes to her house, he stands out in the yard, with his back to the Cumberland River, and a clear path to his truck, to speak with her. Drives his stepdad, the lawyer, nuts.

I attended the ‘comprehensive’ (public) school in the run-down, formerly-industrial, end-of-the-line town where I grew up. Some of the teachers were good, a bunch more were the sort who were only there because they couldn’t have gotten a job anywhere else. I was the smartest kid in my class (which isn’t that much of a boast) and was a lost Lisa Simpson in a busful of Nelsons & Barts, only without the bus.

e/j: I was the same. Comprehensive school for me, and we were poor enough that I had to wear NHS glasses, clothes I grew into and I also had the poor hygiene. I was bullied, but not physically. Say what you want about the hard kids at Penistone, but they were very strict about not hitting kids with glasses.

I scraped 5 O Levels, spent a miserable year and a half in the sixth form and then, before I could fail everything, we moved and I ended up at a college where I was given enough freedom to thrive.

I went to a private school for a while in Sweden (the ISS, formerly known as the anglo-american school), which I recognized then as the best place to actually learn as the rules were strict, homework was heavy and classes were from 9 to 3 whatever the grade. I cursed that I was used to lax hours, no homework, no grades and a 'whatever' mentality from Swedish public schools were I was consistently the smartest kid in school but I had nobody to compete with and dumb rules didn't allow me to read further than the other kids (most of my teachers broke these rules and gave me more books, but some did not which left me terribly bored). Going from a place where I could sleep through class and still do well, to another place where I actually had to apply myself and do it all in another language (English instead of Swedish) left me working hard to catch up, which I eventually did but I recall it was rough the first semester when my science teacher screamed at me for not knowing what capitol letters were (having had to sit through Swedish schools English education "capitol" was only ever used as in "capitol city") and three semesters later I was still lagging behind in math. I switched back to Swedish junior high school in the last year because all my friends were there and I was tired of being the freak who went to a weird school. My grades plummeted (well, dad died that year so that's no surprise really) and I didn't have a good enough average to take the high school education that I wanted (it was called advertising and design. Yup I knew what I wanted at 15.) So I ended up in another private school where rich kids could not spell and I was bullied for not driving a BMW, got sick of that real fast and dropped out the first year.

Then I moved straight on to college once I had worked up enough cash to go. I think my point is, be consistent with schools. Get a good one, of course, but try not to move around so much once you found the good one.

Actually mine is a special case... I've studied in a school that was private but free... just for Air Force Officers kids... So... eleven years of my life in the same social circle... living hell... Specially because my father died when I was 6... so I never really fitted there...

All of the kids where brats... the teachers couldn't say a thing 'cause they started saying... MY FATHER THE COLONEL WHATEVER IS GOING TO MAKE YOU FIRED... and so and so...

Then... I studied in a Public College... what a change!!! Real People... not daddy's little boys or girls... I really liked there...

As for the education... it is more matter of one... For example my brother went to the same school and had a sucky education because he didn't made an effort... myself... I really enjoyed literature, math, science... as nerdy as it sounds... Teachers loved me... so they kinda made my education better... Same in the Public College...

I really think than a Private school can make the difference only if the student allows it... By the way... can you imagine a teacher refusing to be evaluated and asking for failed grades to be ignored?? That was happening here not even a month ago when the Education Ministry ordered test for public school teachers... Unbelievable...

I went to public school in California, in a bunch of districts ranging from mediocre to good. I've certainly heard of high schools with fewer opportunities than mine provided me, and although I was bullied a little in elementary and middle school, in high school I ran with a tougher crowd and learned to keep my mouth shut. I was smart, and my parents really supported me, so I did OK. I disappointed all my councellors by choosing to go to a well-respected but no-cache private school rather than UC Berkeley or an Ivy League.

All in all, I'm glad my parents didn't pay to send me to boarding school, although we considered it.

Public here (state comprehensive in Britain) - primary school (5-11) was fine, I hated hated hated the first five years of secondary school (badly bullied and was very unhappy) but the education was OK, and the sixth form (ages 16-18) was great, with some teachers who really challenged me. I ended up going to one of the best universities in the world (IMO) where in addition to getting a reasonable degree I also caught up on the social development I should have done at school.

Regrets - perhaps it would have been nice to have done Latin? Not sure. A friend of mine did the International Baccalaureat which seems like a good diploma although it sacrifices depth in favour of breadth, it seems to me. I'd still like to get some science A-levels and perhaps I will one day.

Note to Americans - here, 'school' ends at age 16/18.

Public K-12 in the same district.
The district was adept at hiring talented teachers who were good, for the most part, at motivating the students. Junior high ("middle school") was hell for me - I was bullied for being intellectual, which carried over into high school. Fortunately I was able to take classes that put me out of reach of that for at least 3/4 of the day.
The classes were challenging, but could've been more so. There was one teacher in particular who broke that pattern by being a huge stickler for details and demanding that same level of commitment from his students. He was a total bastard, but the ends justified the means: he taught his students how to study and solve problems (and as a side-effect, we learned physics).

We moved every 18 months more or less my whole life. I went to something like 9 different schools, both public and private and I ended up dropping out (of private boarding school in Spain) in March of my senior year. Actually got out about a day before they were going to boot me for embezzling money from student council, so that was all right. It was a quasi Marxist robin hood thing - I was the girls dorm rep to student council and the housefather, who we all hated, used to fine us if our rooms were messy when he inspected them every morning. He'd give me the fine money; I'd give it back to the student. Took him months to figure out why noone cared about the state of their rooms anymore. Heh. I was a bad teenager.

I'd already been kicked out of two other private schools by the time I got there anyway. Who cared? I was a National Merit Scholar finalist with 780 English SAT scores. I remember getting kicked out of my second high school (this one) for cutting school and the headmistress was, like, "You have to go to school," and I said, "Why? I'm getting straight As coming in 2 or 3 times a week, why on earth would I need to be here 5 days? I hate it here." And then she didn't believe me when I told her that I was spending most of my cut days sitting up in a big old live oak near the river reading romance novels, which actually was true with the slight omission of the joint that was up there with me. So she suspended me. Great, another day off.

So. Public school mostly from K - 5th grade, private school mostly from 6th - 12th grade. I never went to public high school. I score incredibly high on standardized tests and I've never had to work at all in school or college to get good grades, which turned out to actually not be so wonderful, because I failed chemistry and geometry in high school: I didn't know how to study. And I've been at a loss with my son, who doesn't automatically do well in school, because I just don't know anything about studying. However, my daughter did okay through school. But at this point I'm not sure my son will make it through high school and I'm trying to figure out alternatives - he's currently in the supposedly very good public high school and unhappy.

Both my kids went public except for middle school. I believe that the public middle schools in this country are pretty much without exception complete disasters - 6th grade is NO time to put a child in a huge mean school full of burnt out teachers. I pulled both my kids at that age and put them in serious hippie private schools and I think it was the best thing I've ever done. These were really small schools (this is where my son went) where the kids got a chance to travel and do a lot of physical stuff and work in communities and learn tons of things that are just, in the long run, more important than traditional academia.

What I've found is that good teachers are rare as hell and there's absolutely no telling where you will find them; in a private or a public school. John Fowles says in The Magus that a truly terrible teacher can be just as educational as a great one and I think he's right - I've also, as a student and a parent, encountered a few of those. Mediocrity is the problem; mediocrity and bureaucracy and small minded petty idiots and unfortunately, in any school, they seem to make up at least half the teachers, unless you get a really great school with a really great, motivated principal who gets the dreck out of there. The only way you'll know is by going and spending time there.

However. Sorry to go on so long. In general I think all kids should spend at least some time in public schools so they get the full gamut of people around them; life isn't going to be restricted to a small subset and it's important to learn how to get along with other people. I sent my daughter to a very bad inner city public school in Baltimore for one year and I remember getting into an argument with a lady on the street about it - it was a poor black school in a rich white neighborhood and she was shocked that I would send my child there. I was young and more idealistic then and I let her have it about white flight and the middle class needing to support the public schools. I did end up moving my daughter to what was probably the last or only really integrated public school in Baltimore and I think it was great for her. There are things about school that are more important than just education.

I went to public school and got a lot out of it. When my grades suffered due to adolescence, guidance counselors suggested the possibility of private school for me. It would have put my folks in the poorhouse, and probably wouldn't have helped, from what I now know about private schools and about myself.

If I'd gone to private schools, I would have learned to be embarrassed by my parents' relative lack of wealth and to sponge off of the rich kids: I would have become even more loathsome than I am now.

Thanks for sharing everyone. I've enjoyed reading this thread.

K-6 was uneventful for the most part. I was a good student, always made A's. Although, I did have a problem with socializing too much at times. In 6th grade I had a horrible homeroom teacher and science teacher. He was burnt out. I remember doodling a lot in his classes. 6th grade is the grade I started worrying about clothes and my social standing.

Seventh grade was horrible and stressful. I was lonely, at a new school and can remember eating lunch by myself for a lot of the year. I also became more aware of the problems at home. Things got worse in 8th grade. I barely skated along 8 through 10. 10th grade was a joke. I had a lot of horrible teachers. In World History the teacher never once gave a lecture, we never had discussion. We copied notes from an overhead projector and read chapters and took quizzes for the entire year. Eleventh grade was a turnaround for me. I had a wonderful English teacher that was inspiring. I learned a lot and had a 4.0 GPA for this year. In 12th grade, I signed up for a program to go to take classes half a day and work in a business-related job in the afternoon. This was a bad move. I should have stayed at school for the entire day, I missed out on interesting classes. I never intended to go into the business world, I wanted to get out of school early.

Like you essexjan I had family problems. I can remember being sad and depressed a lot of the time. Some years were worse than others.

I've stressed over where to send my kids to school for a long while. I am content with our decision to send them to public, in the same district I attended. We don't have the stressors that plagued my childhood home. Husband and I have our act together and are pretty happy, I think the kids are going to be OK.

Prince of Peace Elementary - Private (Catholic)
Carmel High School - Private (Catholic)
Boston University - Public

Carmel was college-prep, and I dropped out of college, so you make the efficacy call.

mgl, I have a similar experience. I didn't do nearly as well on standardized tests, but I almost didn't graduate because I never went to school in my senior year. Made grades were great, but I was barely present. The principal told my dad, "Your girls are intelligent and two of the most respectful girls I've met, but they're never here. I have to let Lori graduate because her grades are good." I would hang on the beach or sleep in my car and then go to work at my "business" job. My first period English teacher was so bothered by this. He would get in a dither and demand to know why I was allowed to be in CBE while missing so much school. I wrote him a letter years later and thanked him for caring and for being a great teacher, he was, and told him I "made it" after all. I didn't make it the way I would have hoped. I went to a state university close to home.

I hang with a lot of wealthy people. They all send their kids to private school. Sometimes I ask myself if I am doing the right thing by sending my kids to public. If the doctors, lawyers, and Indian Chiefs send their kids to private why aren't I? But, for the time being I'm content with public school for my kids. I'm there often enough to realize that it's a great school with dedicated teachers. It's a Title 1 school. Most of my friends couldn't imagine sending their kids there, but the class sizes are much smaller than private, oddly enough. And they're learning the same things at this time, except catechism and foreign language.

MGL, my sister didn't particularly enjoy high-school either and went to the local community college in her senior year and got her highschool diploma. It was a fairly quick process. She went directly to university and got a degree in teaching. This may be an option for your son.

U.S. public schools, mostly in the south, and from grade six (around 12 years old, o ye lovely peeps from other countries) through 11 (around 17 yo), completely integrated schools, about 60% black, 40% white, for which I'm grateful. However, like mgl, I never studied and never learned the trick of it, which hasn't really been helpful in the long run. (Having sound study habits would have made learning Greek in my late 30s when I moved here - and which I haven't actually done - much easier; imagine my astonishment that it didn't just automagically happen somewhere in my head while I was doing other things.)

My education, though, was a lot richer than my schooling, due to my parents, a lot of moving and travelling, and the fact that I was reading pretty much non-stop from the age of six. Unfortunately, the things I didn't/don't read about on my own are a vast
chasm of ignorance for me, and this where teachers (or parents) can be make-or-break for self-learners - if you made a subject seem fascinating to me, that's pretty much all you had to do, I would pursue it on my own. And that's well and good, as far as it goes, but the corollary was also true: if a teacher made a subject seem tedious, I would just pretty much drop it entirely for more interesting explorations.

Public schools, and with a pretty good experience. I'm quite thankful my K-8 experiene took place in ethnically diverse, working- to middle-class schools. Like Sam Clemens, I never let schooling interfere with my education, but I can't really complain.

My high school experience at a public regional school of about 1200 was excellent. A solid college preparatory program was offered, and I was also able to take advantage of an arts magnet school that was operating within the larger school, but drawing kids from the surrounding county. It was a "Fame"-style sort of thing, but far less glamorous. My concentration was in creative writing, and through participation I was able to do a two-month externship with a playwright my senior year, attend Governor's School for the arts, and enjoy a number of other extra-school activities.

When I taught, it was in a private progressive school, a K-8. By then I had rejected most of the assumptions behind the institutionalized, Taylorized public school. School quality is highly dependent on community, school leadership, and local politics. Some public schools do a very fine job, and I embrace the democratic principles on which they are built. But some are grave disappointments and a corruption of the national birthright. Private schools aren't necessarily better from a pedagogical standpoint, but because the initial participant pool by definition includes families of greater affluence, and because the curriculum is designed to be college-preparatory, they appear more successful overall.

Public schools from K-12.

Elementary school in an amazingly racially (and, I suspect, socio-economically) diverse community that, I just found out, specifically engineered it that way during an epidemic of white flight out of Chicago -- the suburb I grew up in did something weird with property taxes to penalize the current (white) residents for leaving while at the same time giving property tax breaks to new people coming into the community. The school district was one of the top in the state, and I remember being surrounded by pretty motivated kids.

We moved to a different district my sixth grade year, again another top-performing school district, and that one sucked for me. Partly because sixth grade sucks for most girls; partly because it was a more nouveau-riche suburb that was just filled with horrible superficial people. But they were all smart, too; I was probably challenged more academically there than any other school.

Middle and high school were outside Atlanta, again in top school districts for the area. (My parents refused to move anywhere that wasn't good on paper, academically.) Middle school kinda sucked, but I liked high school. Tons of activities, lots of AP classes, mostly good teachers, not too many cliques (at least, not hostile to each other). My graduating class had nine students go on to the Ivy Leagues (as well as others who got into other great schools around the country), which was a new record for the school and a little unusual for a public school in Georgia.

I was pretty much always the teacher's pet, and never needed to study all that hard to make decent grades, and I always loved to read, so I always liked school. I learned relatively early how to put out enough effort to do good work without spending so much time and effort that it'd make me nuts, unless I was really interested in something.

I certainly felt prepared for college, and generally felt I had a better education than half the private school kids who often seemed more clique-ish and ... formal? old-fashioned? I don't know, there was something weird to me about going to college and seeing all these prep-school boys with their preppy clothing and identical haircuts. Like I was in Dead Poets' Society, with less interesting conversations.

Public school in SoCal K-12. K-5 was good (I can remember their names!). I liked my teachers, they were engaging and encouraged us to learn. Hell started in 6th grade (junior high/middle school) - lots of bullying and when I wasn't being bullied I was invisible. High school (9-12) wasn't too bad. Mostly uninterested teachers, I was invisible (to the teachers and the bullies) except for one English teacher. She (damned if I can remember her name, but I remember she drove a Jaguar) really liked my writing and encouraged me to keep it up.

My folks switched me from the public school down the street to a private school 7 miles from home, starting in second grade. here, if you're interested.

I was an unusually bright kid and I enjoyed being educated by smart teachers and having other smart kids around. It cost my folks a bundle of money - tuition for my senior year of high school alone would've paid for a year of a decent college - but I'm certainly appreciative of it.

In my professional life, I'm often astounded that there's a presumption that privately educated kids are, on the whole, smarter than publicly educated kids. It hasn't borne itself out; it appears that inherent smartness is pretty evenly distributed throughout the population, regardless of type of education. How much knowledge one may have on a particular topic is, of course, a different story. But in terms of sheer perceptiveness, astuteness, or ability to learn, private has nothing over public, nor vice versa.

In teaching college groups, I've found that the public and state school students, while they have less 'polish' or whatever you may call it, tend to exhibit more actual thinking than students from private colleges. Perhaps because of their greater diversity of background within each age cohort, they approach topics with more variety in point of view, and the discussions become more visceral and interesting. With private college students, there are so many shared cultural assumptions that it's difficult to get a true conversation going.

No matter how good an education is, teachers and schools can really never provide the bulk of what makes a person educated. There must be parental investment, breadth of experience, and internal motivation. For this reason most schools come out fairly equal, given good parenting, unless the environment is actually creating a situation in which kids are miserable and thus unable to learn. Which isn't as uncommon as I'd like. My brother, who is extremely bright, came up through the same system I did, but happened to catch more of the lousy teachers (the ones on the verge of retirement who didn't give a damn, ones who ruled by the sword, ones who used belittlement or bullying as classroom management...), and , as a result, just hated school. He dropped out at 16 and got his GED, then worked for a few years before going to college. He remembers schooling as a dull and sometimes cruel waste of his time.

I'm sorry.

I can't answer this question.

It's just too painful.

Sorry.

Both. 9 yrs private (Catholic schools), 3 public. And you know what? The public was way better. The private wasn't too shabby, mind you. But I think the public school suited me better.

Public school all the way, even college (Indiana University). I think I got a good education.

Unfortunately, the schools in my district have gone waaaaay downhill since I went there. : (