My Old School

“And I’m never going back … to my old school.”

One day when I was about fourteen, my parents gave me a brochure from the Georgetown Preparatory School, in Garrett Park, Maryland. This was before Tom Brown’s School Days was on television, and I had no notions about private schools. All the kids I knew and all the kids on TV attended public school. But my father had gone to a Jesuit school in New York City, and thought that I would do well under the same sort of tutelage.

To be accepted I had to take the Secondary School Aptitude Test, the SSAT, and be interviewed. I always loved taking standardized tests; to me it was like a day off school. At the interview they asked what sports I played. I knew almost nothing about team sports other than baseball, which I had played badly, but my Mom offered that I loved to swim. They let me in.

Now I read about Georgetown Prep as an elite school. There were some guys from wealthy families, and some diplomat kids, but a lot of the guys were from striving middle class backgrounds like me. Some had to work in the dining hall to help pay their tuition. It wasn’t Eton, or even Choate. I somehow knew we were better off than Cardozo, but I never felt that we were very different than the other schools we swam against: St Albans, Sidwell Friends, Good Counsel, Bullis, Bishop Ireton, Gonzaga.

I certainly got that classical education at Prep: we took Latin, Calculus, read books by DWMs, and dreaded Speech class. There were no dummies in my form, and I think that not wanting to look bad in class spurred me to try harder than I would have at public school. We were also made to sit down and do three hours of homework every evening, whereas at home I probably would have watched a lot more TV. We were also encouraged to do team sports, which led me to the swim team. All of that was good.

But Prep was all-male, so public school would have offered far more interaction with girls. A few young ladies from Stone Ridge attended our science classes. They were the source of many fantasies, but I never spoke to them. A lot of private school girls attended our mixers, but I was too terrified to talk to them. In four years I think I met two girls through Prep. I was staying overnight with a classmate, and his mother’s friend brought her daughter, who I now remember as looking like Martha Plimpton, sort of awkward/pretty. She played her guitar and sang Joni Mitchell’s Clouds for us. We were not on each other’s wavelength, but I wish I had tried harder. Later I was at a school play, and sat next to the sister of a classmate. She was pretty. We talked quite a bit, and she was very nice, but I had no idea what my next move might be. The next day her brother teased me about my great romantic encounter. And that was the end of that.

So I read that current Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is accused of trying to molest a 15 year-old girl from Holton-Arms, at a party. I didn’t go to parties at day student’s houses, but I heard some bits about them. We had a minor sensation after one of my classmates punched one of my swim teammates over a girl, which I believe happened at a party.

Kavanaugh and Gorsuch attended about a decade after my time. GP seems to appreciate the notoriety of alums in the highest court in the land, but people on twitter now refer to it as that, “creepy little all-boys school.” Democracy Now! quotes journalist Sarah Posner:

“It is becoming abundantly clear, even by the account of Kavanaugh himself and Mark Judge, that there was an environment [at Georgetown Prep] that was out of control, quite frankly. And lets be very clear and fair here. We are not saying that every student at Georgetown Prep acted this way. But according to this article in The Washington Post this morning, which I again urge everyone to read, this was a very prevalent atmosphere there—the drinking, the drugs, the abuse of girls from neighboring high schools.”

Did anyone else ever watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High? I’m not defending it, but I have to believe that drinking, drugs and abuse of women could probably have been observed at almost any high school, public or private.

I was not in favor of appointing Gorsuch (or Garland) and I think Kavanaugh is an even more troublesome candidate. I just hope people realize that many of us at Prep were not smug rich kids, or heavy drinkers, or would-be sexual predators.