Back to school ...

Kansas City, 8 September 2005

It was parents’ night at our daughter’s school. Pembroke is a private school. It is not religious, just selective and focused on providing a strong education. Her teachers impressed us, they are enthusiastic and dedicated. Equally impressive, though, were the parents – mostly not divorced and all concerned and serious about the education their children receive. There is more: there is a quiet conspiracy amongst the parents. This conspiracy is unspoken and it is naturally occurring – we are all dedicated to spying on our offspring. We know that they are growing up in a world so different from our own that the two are mutually exclusive; what we experienced is as different from what they could experience as what we went through in the 1950’s and early 1960’s was different from what our ancestors went through a hundred years before that. Time has so accelerated that the only way we can manage what is happening or what could happen to our children is by simply spying on them.

The espionage we practice is benevolent in intent. We aim to know enough about the lives of our children that we can help them navigate through waters rougher, deeper and more unpredictable than we could have imagined.

There is some diversity at Pembroke – there are a few Jews, some blacks, scattered Asians – but mostly it is white and very mid-Western. I don’t think that’s wrong, however, I admire the self-conscious attempt at diversity and the inbred civility of these people here. The values that my Eurasian daughter will absorb in this place are good.

So, Alex, very much a fourteen year-old – with everything that implies – is now a high school student in this most mid-Western of places. After schooling in Hong Kong, in Manila, in Singapore, in Spain, in England and in Arizona, she has lit here (her father has been blown from place to place like that feather in ‘Forrest Gump’). Again, I think this is good.