People always assume I went to public school, which I didn't, so that immediately puts me somewhere.
I guess if you have had a good education as opposed to someone who hasn't been to school, you start off on this journey having studied Shakespeare for years and years or studied classics. I suppose why people see this big divide - the boarding school boys getting all the roles - is because they feel like some people have had a head start.
Having a larger vocabulary the day you walk into kindergarten is advantageous.
I was a reader. I loved reading. Reading things gave me pleasure. I was very good at most subjects in school, not because I had any particular aptitude in them, but because normally on the first day of school they'd hand out schoolbooks, and I'd read them--which would mean that I'd know what was coming up, because I'd read it.
Having kids has proven to be this amazing - for me, this amazing source of ideas of anecdotes, of examples, I can test my own kids without human subject permission, so they pilot - I pilot my ideas on them. And so it is a tremendous advantage to have kids if you're going to be a developmental psychologist.
Private schools are gaming the system. There is way too much state money going in, and people who go to private schools seem to be given a head start for all of the top jobs and that's something that needs to be dealt with as well.
These ivy league students are in the upper echelon of the college boards and had great opportunity in front of them regardless of where they go to college. Its in their very nature and it is something they expect.
I'm very lucky, coming from a great school.
I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.
What SAT tutoring does is it invisibly alters the admissions pool so a school could try to be as egalitarian as they can, but if a student is SAT-tutored, and their score goes up 200 points in a year, and the college admissions committee has no idea that the student got tutored, all of a sudden it's shifting the pool back toward old money.
Students raised on Park Avenue are born into family situations in which overachieving merely maintains the status quo, and therefore the market is primed for anyone offering services that provide an edge on local peers.
My sisters were very successful and confident. It was, 'Oh, you are Pippa's brother! Are you Catherine's brother?' And so I was automatically put into the top sports teams and academic sets.
I have a great advantage over many of my colleagues inasmuch as my students bring with them to class their own personal knowledge of national, regional, religious, ethnic, occupational, and family folklore traditions.
