I have to concur very strongly with John_Galt. I've gone back and forth from public to private schools. so I might be in a unique position to evaluate the two side-by-side.
Elementary school - public school, inner city, poor white kids and immigrants. Straight up grimy, war zone refugee kids with mental problems, kids who were part of gangs
High school - private school, elite, some of the richest people in the country (got really lucky here)
College - public state school, farmers' kids were common
Grad school - Ivy (and I interacted heavily with the undergrads, know them extremely well)
The one thing all good kids had: good genetics (high IQ) and solid parents/community.
No doubt on average the kids in the private schools were smarter than the public school kids. Pure IQ, private school kids win hands-down. On the flipside, no amount of private school can fix stupid (low IQ). Additionally, money cannot make up for a shitty parenting style. I've also seen plenty of kids with rich medical doctors as parents be complete fuckups and losers.
In contrast, my parents weren't well-educated. Not even close. Dad never finished high school. Couldn't help me with my homework. We grew up poor. But one thing they did do - be quality parents: provide a safe and stable home, be there for me every day of the week, emphasize the importance of education, take me to the library on weekends. The deep curiosity my parents fostered in me at an early age has done more for me than any $20K private school education could.
In terms of well-being, the public school kids win hands down. I understand the lure of a great school district. But more often than not, those kids grow up feeling deeply insecure. This manifests itself into a fake persona (everyone pretending like life is easy when in reality they're overworked), complete mental breakdown in college (Tim Ferriss almost committed suicide at Princeton after getting rejected from McKinsey -
http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/05/06/h...suicide/), and an almost robotic desire to pursue 'prestigious' jobs (80hour work weeks at elite finance, tech and consulting firms).
The greatest irony - these kids end up financially successful, settle down in a great school district and have their kids repeat the process. Why? So their grandkids can repeat the process and on and on it goes. In more extreme cases, it comes to bite you in the ass when your kids blows your head off to get your money:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...ather.html
The greatest sadness - these kids would have been done fine and been much happier in a different life. And it really is sad: drug use is high, so are rates of suicide (look at Tim Ferriss for an example). There are tons of articles about high school kids committing suicide in areas such as Palo Alto. All that Silicon Valley dough can't bring back a dead kid. Cornell supposedly had to gate their bridges so kids would stop jumping from them into the gorges beneath.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arch...es/413140/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_gorge_suicides
People talk about contacts and connections as if they're always a good thing. They CAN be a good thing if the kid has a solid foundation (need solid parenting). However having such a network can backfire badly. Maybe not consciously, but subconsciously seeing all your friends make $100K+ will affect your own choices. Paul Sullivan wrote a book called The Thin Green Line - in which he talks about how people working in finance would buy $3M houses on a $400K salary. They all got fucked over when the economy collapsed in 2008. Do you know why they bought a $3M house they could not afford? Because all their friends (this great precious network) had $3M houses. This despite the fact that you would expect people who work in finance to make better financial decisions in their personal lives.
And that's only the money aspect. The status/prestige aspect is even more insidious. At least you can hide how much you make. You can't hide where you got your first job, whether you made VP or Partner by the age of 30, whether you got into Harvard Business School or had a book published. But hey, at least you made connections, right? Never mind you're spending $500 on a bar tab every weekend drinking your sorrows away because you're a 'failure in life'.
Why do we want our kids to be financially successful? On a fundamental level, we simply want our kids to be happy in life. In modern society, we have confounded financial success with satisfaction in life. Be rich and you'll never have to worry again. But the really insidious truth is the Faustian bargain you have to make to go the private elite high school -> Ivy League -> top med school/tech/consulting/finance gig route. For many people I know, the wheel of pain will never stop turning, no matter the success level. As Roosh aptly put it in his recent philosophical musings, this continuous goal achieving leads nowhere.
The biggest shock to me came when I started attending an Ivy League school. I was so excited to meet these superstar kids. I had expected them to have their entire lives sorted out. Surely these kids must have amazing lives. It was weird to finally realize that their lives actually sucked pretty hard. I have several Ivy League friends confide in me that they'd wish they'd gone to a state school instead.
I won't stop my children from attending top universities (if they get accepted). But I'm not going out of my way to ensure they get into Ivy League schools. The harsh reality is that you cannot teach your kids how life really works in a safe environment: my parents were poor, I grew up poor. It taught me a strong work ethic, strong moral values and the importance of family/community and education. If I live in a rich area where many things are a given, sure I can tell my kids how I grew up poor, but they'll never really understand it. It's like telling a guy who's never interacted with women what the Red Pill is all about. Intellectually he can get it, but he won't understand it on a visceral level until he goes through a few women. Similarly, I don't need to pretend to be poor - but by putting my kids in a nice elite suburb I rob them of the opportunity to understand the world as it really is.
Do you guys know why so many kids at elite universities gobble up the SJW bullshit? It's because they have no real life reference to compare that leftist crap ideology with. When everyone you know has been successful, it's easy to get convinced that the only reason people could be doing bad is because of oppression by the white man. When you've never interacted with a blue collar worker, it's easy to get convinced the only reason people could support Trump is because they're racist. This is the path you set your kids on when all they've ever known are private schools and highly successful people.