Thursday, April 1, 2010

Every child (with wealthy parents)

I have been passing this same bench every day for the past year or so, and it has been getting on my nerves every day since I first saw it.




It is somewhat blurry, but it says "Every child, every chance, every day" and is an ad for Montessori schools.

Now I love the premise of Montessori schools, I really like how kids can essentially teach themselves without all the same structures of a typical classroom setting. However, I don't like the $7000 per year tuition price tag, but apparently that is quite cheap. In Toronto, tuition ranges from $10,300 for kindergarten to $19,895 for grades 11 and 12. That is more expensive than my undergraduate university tuition in this province (Ontario), but it is for children in elementary school.

So, how can they claim this option is for every child? Maybe it should say "Every child whose parents can afford the tuition, every chance offered to children of the elite, every day in capitalist societies."

I don't know how they can even use the words "every child" in their ads when they do not allow just any child in their school. This is a blatant example of how privileged is reproduced.

4 comments:

  1. If you could keep the portion of your taxes that go to education and use it to pay for Montessori tuition, that might give more children access to its services. However if you pay taxes on top of Montessori tuition then of course you are right on the mark Ms. Marx . . . privilege is perpetuated.

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  2. Thank you Zack.

    And keeping taxes for education sounds like a really good idea to open these schools up to more people, but there are problems with it as well.

    First, a lot of the poorest people do not pay enough in taxes to help all that much (the gross income for people working minimum wage jobs in a lot of places wouldn't even cover their high school tuition), and therefore would still not be able to send their children to these private schools.

    Another possible problem is that if there are fewer tax dollars going towards education, it could lead to less funding for public schools, and they are drastically underfunded to begin with.

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  3. To be fair, this is really just another private school ad. I went to Montessori elementary school in the midwest and on the east coast and both were public "options" offered in my town, as opposed to the other public schools.

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