Education Differences---kindergarten years

I knew there were huge differences in emphasis and quality of education between LA and the East. I had no idea how vast the difference since I had spent a large chunk of my adult life in LA, having been brainwashed to believe that Buckley--the school that can claim as its alumni, Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton--was a great, prestigious institution. The lapses in intellectual rigor of those attending state institutions: Cal State, UCLA, and the rest of the UC's was apparent to me since I had been ingrained in the educational expectations of the East Coast. The reality is not just about quality, so much as the inherent cultural schisms between the two coasts. In LA, a city where a window washer can one day, miraculously, become a 'power broker' in the film industry, is a city that believes its own mythology about people becoming instant successes. Most of the 'old money' in LA were families from dusty, Midwestern small towns, who, unlike their Eastern counterparts, didn't buy into the idea that educational institutions were the necessary building blocks to prestige and success. This prevalent, long lasting cultural bias has carried over into every aspect of the city.

Despite the sunny clime and the suburban lifestyle, LA, I now discover, doesn't hold a candle for the kid-obsessed generation of new parents. New York, that fast-paced urban mecca, is all about kids and all about enrichment opportunities for the littlest denizens of the city. In LA, my husband and I, not being able to run too far from our East Coast expectations, were the parents whose kid was enrolled for endless classes, or so it felt. Now in New York, well, it seems our child has been leading a much too relaxed first five years. The endless opportunities for him to enroll in classes--Mandarin anyone? French cooking for preschoolers?--in this city is longer than the length of Park Avenue from downtown to uptown. The sheer number of activities available to kids is shocking, to say the least. Who knew? But then, it seems fitting that the neuroses of the parents, all driven people, would bleed down to the little citizens of this city of steel and glass.

Another inherent difference between the two coasts was felt my first few days at my son's Kindergarten class, which is public, albeit a very good public school, when the teacher explained that kids were to have composition notebooks to write journal entries. Journal entries? My son, who has not been pushed to read or write before the start of Kindergarten, can barely write his name much less a journal entry about how he feels. So, here we are now joining this new race. Despite my sheer relief to be back after so many years, I have brought with me some of the cultural mores of the city that had been the root of so much my unhappiness. I am signing my son up for the Tae Kwon Do classes he seems to enjoy so much, but am passing on the Mandarin classes, and definitely ignoring the French cooking classes. See, I am an Easterner, through and through. Those inherent expectations where education are concerned are at the core of who I am, and how I was raised. But I, after so many years on the Left Coast, recognize when parents are pushing their children for ego and not for the benefit of the child. Will my son spend his later years in therapy about missing the French cooking classes? I can guarantee he will spend a few number of years on the couch, but I am pretty certain it won't be for that reason. I, unfortunately, will provide him with so many other reasons.