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By Root 285 0

none of the children are dumb, sloppy, mean, clumsy, or ugly. The hyperambitious and affluent have never bought into the bargain-bin theory of education, because they could afford not to. For those born into families bred to believe in OTB, nothing else will do. Especially when it comes to privately educating the flesh of their dewy, aerobicized flesh. Again, this is not the reality for most families. Most families cannot afford to pay thirty thousand dollars for preschool, or any of the other stages of OTB. Just look at what happened to my former employer—the Pineville branch of the Accelerated College Coaching and Educational Preparedness Tutorial. ACCEPT! closed within a year of its opening because our hometown population still sports way more blue collars than white.

But OTB is the reality for Marin. Privilege, you see, has its membership.

“Auntie J? Are you even listening? You’re so quiet!”

“I’m quiet because I’m listening.”

“Oh! Sixty-five, seventy…”

I don’t begrudge my niece for being born into money, if not class. (Class is far less important than money these days, anyway.) Bethany is naturally inclined to be ambivalent about academics, so perhaps Marin has a fighting chance to actually have genuine fun and not the trademarked variety. I would hate it if she turned into one of those automatons whose achievements are taken for granted as givens, and never fully appreciated or enjoyed. I don’t want everything for her to be the means to an end, only without end, because there will always be another OTB to put on her curriculum vitae.

As the babysitting aunt, I’m allowed to slack off, to skip The Fun Chart™ and cue Grease 3. It’s okay to occasionally show her an alternative to OTB. But as a parent, the number one influence in her life, leading by my example would be considered a road to ruin. After all, who am I but a marginally employed idiot who could only get into one of the lesser Ivies?

All of this reminds me of another study I read for Think. A UK economist posits that within the next thousand years, humans will divide into two subspecies. As the result of superior interbreeding, the upper class will evolve into seven-foot-tall, supermodel geniuses with pneumaboobs for the ladies and rocketcocks for the gents. The underclass will downgrade to a class of dim-witted, mini-titted, raisin-dicked hobgoblins. It’s not just sci-fi, it’s really happening. I challenge you to spend fifteen minutes in Barneys followed by another fifteen at WalMart and still deny it.

“One hundred! See? I told you I could do it!”

“I never doubted you,” I said.

“Okay! I gotta go now! I love you! You’re the best aunt ever!”

“Maybe not the best,” I said. “But I do okay.”

“You’re the best because you’re miiiiiiiine,” she said before abruptly hanging up.

I can’t save the human race. But I wish I could protect Marin from harm. If only I were able to guarantee that Marin would thrive under my guidance, and that she would always be as self-confident and happy as she was this morning when she counted to one hundred by fives.

thirty-eight

So I’m a little jealous of a four-year-old. And she’s not the only one.

You’re at Princeton. Hope is doing her graduate work at Pratt. Len, MIT. Bridget and Percy are finishing up their hers ’n’ his B.A.’s in Metropolitan Studies (hers with a concentration in art and public policy, his in urban ethnography and economics). Manda is also going to NYU part-time for her M.S.W. at the School for Social Work. I’d even heard Shea rapping about enrolling in some sort of deejay-apprenticing program to “perfeck” her “mad turntable skillz,” not that it matters, since I’ll never be seeing her around these parts again.

Most of my friends from Columbia are going on to get advanced degrees. And why not? A Ph.D. is the new M.A., a master’s is the new bachelor’s, a B.A. is the new high school diploma, and a high school diploma is the new smiley-face sticker on your first-grade spelling test. You don’t know most of these people, but again, indulge me as I provide some cogent examples:

Former high school crush-to-end-all-crushes,