TOW #12 "Prep School: Talking Trash" by Petra Janney on the Huffington Post

As the political landscape has become fraught with talk of education reform over the past decade or so, many parents have made the decision to avoid the trials and tribulations of public education and simply send their kids to costly, but perhaps more stable and higher quality, private schools. Chief among the concerns of many of these parents are the issues regarding public school funding, and the quality of the educations received in these sorts of settings, in the face of mounting issues over class size and crumbling academic infrastructure. In the opinion of Petra Janney, a recent graduate from the esteemed Phillips Exeter Academy, these high-priced private institutions often don't solve the underlying issues that led many parents to seek them over comparable public schools. Instead, Janney argues, they only serve to exacerbate them.

In examining this belief, Janney outlines her own experience with an esteemed private education to shed light on her feelings. "Those who attend Exeter learn not how to share and benefit from these differences - they learn how to be the same," Janney writes. It is her opinion, as she expresses here and throughout the essay, that private pre-collegiate institutions mainly serve to behave like public school's on steroids, magnifying and extending the underlying issues of a poor quality educational environment, and perhaps a broken grading structure, and making them all the more harmful.

Janney makes use of a number of rhetorical devices to qualify and quantify these beliefs of hers to an audience who is no doubt both taken aback and perhaps even appalled by her feelings. Chief among the devices she uses is frequent exemplification. "Students chasing the elusive "A" at Exeter learn to care more for the sound of their own voices than the class material when they discover that as much as fifty percent of their grade rests on their in-class verbalizations," Janney writes. "As a result, I spent much of my time listening to outgoing students compare the facial hair of the American presidents rather than analyzing the implications of their policy decisions." This sort of exemplification is, in reality, the only major rhetorical device that Janney makes use of to enforce her point. That being said, it is all that is necessary on her part. As a student at Phillips Exeter, she is rewarded an automatic sense of ethos, as she is qualified to speak on behalf of her own experiences. This, along with the frequent exemplification that the author favors, do all that is needed to clarify her belief that a private education is, in and of itself, not a solution to the problems that drive many parents to send their kids into such environments.