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I read a cover story in the New York Times Magazine about a 10-year-old basketball prodigy already receiving the attention of college recruiters, marketers, and coaches. The article gave an astonishing and perplexing glimpse into the world of ultra-competitive youth basketball, in which kids play on multiple teams, flying around the country and staying in hotels, while receiving all sorts of free swag from athletic goods companies. It's all about being a future "prospect." Two 10-year-old hoop stars have already been offered college scholarships.

You could argue that the experience of prodigies has little to do with what most kids go through. But I think it does. Another NYT article, "Kindergarten Cram," cites a survey showing that kindergartners in New York and L.A. spend 2-3 hours a day being taught and tested in reading and math -- and less than 30 minutes playing. And the urgency felt by many about getting their kids into the "right" pre-school is a commonplace of middle class life today.  Amid all the focus on achievement, the early specialization in sports and the arts, and the anxious parental fixation on the future, I sometimes think that childhood itself is disappearing.

So many people seem caught up in the clamor for advantage, driven by a panicky ambition to prevail. Partly this reflects the rampant materialism of the last three decades. Expectations have been driven so high. Think about what size house people now expect, what size bathrooms. (Remember the tiny bathrooms we all grew up with, and seemingly happily?). Meanwhile, the spectrum of economic outcomes has been stretched so wide. Much, much more so than when I graduated from college in 1981, we are a society of winners and losers. You have to compete early and well, seizing every advantage--thus the obsession with the "right" school. Maybe the current economic crisis will alleviate this pressure. Or maybe competition will get even tougher.

Larkin starts preschool in the fall. Three doors down from us, our local public primary school, Noah Webster School, has a program for 3-year-olds. A big part of me longs for the days when you just sent your kid to the nearest place and didn't worry about it; and I love the thought of walking our daughter to school a half-block away. Still, if Larkin goes there, she'll be an anomaly, by virtue both of race and class. While Connecticut is a wealthy state, its cities are mired in poverty. Here in Hartford, two decades of white flight have shrunk the non-black or Latino public school population to 2%. We have the largest city/suburban academic achievement gap in the country, and one of the highest juvenile incarceration rates. At one point a few years back, Hartford High School, where our neighborhood primary schoolers eventually end up, had a pregnancy rate that exceeded its graduation rate. What a glum statistic.

Our other pre-K options for Larkin consist of various private programs (read: $$) and a pair of highly-touted public magnet schools, serving both Hartford and a number of surrounding towns, where admission is handled through a highly complicated -- and highly competitive -- lottery. I went to an open house at one of them, a pre-K-through-7th school with a curriculum developed from Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. It's a gorgeous facility, set in bucolic surroundings on a university campus.

 After a tour, the principal and other administrators made presentations. They were proud of their school, and justly so. The room was packed with parents, and when the time came for questions, one after another asked not about the curriculum or the facilities or arts enrichment, but about the lottery -- how it worked, what their chances were. The answers we got were friendly but vague, designed perhaps to obscure the hard reality that as a 3-year-old your child has about a one-in-10 chance of admission -- and that her chances in subsequent years drop off sharply from there. 

If Larkin didn't get into a public magnet school, and if we opt for a private preschool plus some supplementary day care, the difference for us next year would amount to about $10,000. Molly and I could afford that if we had to. Looking around at the other parents, I wondered how many wouldn't be able to. You could feel the tension in the room, the nervousness, the hopefulness. I found myself being overtaken by resentment. Why should the ideal education, the one with resources and pedagogic theories behind it, and gardens and violins and amphitheaters, be dangled in front of us like a bauble, then snatched away from most? Why should the education system be run like the corner Lotto?

Last week we got the results. Larkin lost the lottery. She's #28 on the waitlist at one school, #114 at the other. No chance, in other words. So it's either private preschool, or Webster. I visited the school the other day and was given a tour by a teacher in her late 30s, a highly articulate and dedicated woman who has taught there for 15 years. The building was newly renovated, and it had a good feel to it, in that intangible way that a well-run school does. I was reassured. In the halls I looked at the pupils, nearly all kids of color, in their uniforms of khaki pants and red shirts, and wondered what it would be like for Larkin to go there. 
I guess she'll find out, because we're sending her. The fact is, Larkin already won her first lottery, merely by being born into a family with a high level of education and some financial resources to back it up. So we're going to be glad of that, and walk her down the block each morning to her neighborhood public school.