The Price of Privilege

"Levine worries that we’re creating a generation of overpressured and overprivileged kids who don’t know how to thrive on their own. Her message to parents is: Manipulating our children to succeed so we can feel good about ourselves is selfish, and runs the risk of creating hollow, unhappy and unloving kids who will hate us when they become adults. Every kid deserves an excellent education. Education is the escalator that can take lower-income kids into the middle class. In America we have many substandard middle-class schools and far too many substandard low-income schools. My hope, in writing my book The Good School , was that parents could use it to educate themselves about what schools are doing and to constructively engage with schools to improve education for their children, the children around them and the children that will follow them. Because we know that strong schools create strong communities. Schools are frontiers for civic engagement. Engaging in improving the educational system can pay dividends for generations. But unless we’re more knowledgeable about it, we’re not going to be very good at it. That’s why I’ve written this book, to give parents the benefit of the best thinking so they can be better-educated consumers and reformers of education."