A Black Student's Reflection on Public and Private Schools

Abstract

Which are more effective, private or public schools? This is an age-old question to which many educators and researchers have offered their answers. In this compelling essay, Imani Perry, a fifteen-year-old high school student, offers an interpretation of the differences between her private and public school experience that adds new insight into this question. Perry provides rich examples to support her main argument that, in her experience, public schools deny students their identity as intellectual beings, and repress the intellectual development of minority students in particular. Private schools, on the other hand, are culturally isolating for minority students. Perry does not advocate the abandonment of public for private school, but offers a clear analysis of those aspects of public schools that must be changed if public schools are to serve the needs of minority students. This is an analysis that could only come from a minority student who has experienced both worlds.