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More on Books & Critics from The Atlantic Monthly. More on Politics & Society from The Atlantic Monthly. From the archives:
"The Organization Kid"
(April 2001)
"Extreme Parenting"
(July/August 2006)
"Schooling the Imagination"
(September 1999) From Atlantic Unbound:
Flashbacks: "The Best Interests of the Child"
(October 3, 2005)
Flashbacks: "That's Edutainment"
(July 24, 2006)
Also by Jennie Rothenberg:
"Beyond Space Invaders"
(October 3, 2006)
"Out of the Darkness"
(July 11, 2006)
"Same Planet, Different Worlds"
(June 15, 2006)
Previously in Interviews:
"Doodlers-in-Chief"
(August 28, 2006)
"Endgaming the Terror War"
(August 8, 2006)
"Common Knowledge"
(August 1, 2006)
"Poet in Residence"
(July 25, 2006)
"Reading and Writing"
(July 18, 2006)
"The American War Machine"
(June 21, 2006)
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Interviews Stop the Insanity!Sandra Tsing-Loh describes the elite, utopian island of urban private education—and explains why she opted to steer clear of it..... andra Tsing Loh is no shrinking violet. During the 1980s, as an L.A.-based musician and performance artist, she made a name for herself with outrageous piano “spectacles,” playing concerts on the back of a flatbed truck at rush hour or showering a raucous audience with autographed $1 bills. When she serenaded spawning fish on a Malibu beach at midnight, nearly a thousand spectators showed up to watch and listen. But last year, Loh found herself huddled alone in the driver’s seat of her white Toyota minivan, crying in a deserted parking lot in the rain. Her four-year-old daughter, Madeline, had just been denied entry to a private school, and Loh lacked the courage to face the world. Madeline had been turned away after failing an exam that asked her to identify her favorite ice cream (mango) and list a few animals (lion, tiger, hippopotamus). Her answers had displeased the school administrators, who determined that the little girl was not developmentally ready for kindergarten. At that moment, Loh wrote in the June 2005 Atlantic, “I saw the error of my relaxed, irreverent ways…. If her mother had been paying any attention, I thought, my daughter would not be sitting alone come September with no kindergarten to go to, One Child Left Behind.” Today, Madeline is happily settled into a public magnet school, and Loh has become a vocal advocate for public education. In her new incarnation as a “big-barreled Mother Jones-like figure,” she welcomes the chance to review four new books about parental mania for the October 2006 Atlantic. Given the choice, she admits, she would prefer to hurl the books at the heads of hysterical parents while a therapist hollers, “Stop the insanity!” Instead, in "The Drama of the Gifted Parent," she lets loose a stream of jocose words, having fun at the expense of litigious lawyer fathers, “leafy/Waldorf School” mothers, and Harvard graduates who make their living polishing high school essays for $299.95 a pop. As a veteran of the kindergarten admissions frenzy, Loh is candid about the lure of private education. The problem, as she sees it, is twofold. First, she highlights the absurdity of “academic parent-child hit squads,” teams of overachieving adults and their offspring who will stop at nothing in their high-speed pursuit of the Ivy League. “I worry,” writes Loh, “that unless they join some sort of MTV-sponsored witness-protection program, such children have no hope of ever getting laid.” When it comes to progressive parents, those who favor eucalyptus-scented campuses where their children can study Nordic mythology and African percussion, Loh fears that the taste for alternative education is widening the canyon between rich and poor. It all begins innocently enough, she writes. A sweet, well-meaning European devises a new theory of early childhood development, and an exclusive school springs up around it:
In Loh’s eyes, America is ripe for a new cultural revolution. This time, she envisions young people burning not bras and draft cards but copies of U.S. News & World Report. College dropouts such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have paved the way, proving that success doesn’t hinge on a prestigious college education, let alone kindergarten aptitude. In the end, she says, the “yellow brick road” that leads to a six-figure income at Goldman Sachs is a mirage. “Many of us, unsure of how we got where we are in the first place, are just as unsure of what education will best prepare our children for an unknowable future.” Loh lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Mike, and their daughters, six-year-old Madeline and four-year-old Susannah. She is the author of three books, most recently A Year in Van Nuys (2002), and is a noted National Public Radio personality. We spoke by telephone on August 16.
—Jennie Rothenberg
Discuss this article in Post & Riposte. More Interviews in Atlantic Unbound. Jennie Rothenberg is associate editor of The Atlantic Online. Copyright © 2006 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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