The candidate knocked at my door. “Good afternoon, sir. My name is such and such and I’m running for so and so.” After a bit of small talk, I asked what high school he went to. He started to answer in all but a whisper: “Puh, puh, puh.”
I told him to speak up. “Don’t worry. I went to Roosevelt. I went to community college. I don’t care if you went to Punahou.”
“All I care about is what you’re going to do for our district. How are you going to lead?”
This is more common than you’d think. Put some of our private school alumni in a mixed room and they suddenly become shy about being Raiders (to be fair, Punahou alumni should be shy about pretending that the winged-O is a mascot).
Someone, somewhere taught them that privilege is something to be ashamed of. Maybe it was a college professor. Maybe the DEI director at their corporate job. Maybe they got tired of cousins giving them grief at the family potluck. However it happened, they absorbed the idea that the advantages they received were a verdict on their character.
But consider what they’re actually ashamed of. Better-resourced classrooms. Championship athletic programs. Campuses that genuinely do look like country clubs. College counselors whose entire job is getting seniors into good schools. Alumni networks that, 15 years after graduation, still open doors.
The Hawai‘i Preparatory Academy graduates are the funniest. They almost always have to preface, either admitting that they were kicked out of another school or maintaining that they were not. And you’ll occasionally meet the Punahou or ‘Iolani alum who hastens to clarify that they were on athletic scholarship, or that financial aid covered most of it. Midpac students are the least squeamish, though that’s changing as tuition rises. This year, tuition is over $30,000 at most of the elite private schools. And it’s okay, brother. I don’t care if your family is rich.
Being poor is not a virtue, and having wealth is not a sin. The most contemptuous attitudes toward the poor I’ve ever encountered came not from old money but from the man who clawed his way out of poverty. You’ve met the Horatio Alger type, who now looks back at his childhood friends and sees crabs in a bucket. Shame about wealth doesn’t produce generosity. It produces paralysis, or the bitterness that mistakes suffering for moral achievement.
Private school does not protect families from themselves. I’ve known private school students with drug problems, children of divorce, kids who came home to an empty house and a credit card on the counter. The school doesn’t sanctify the household.
“Praise God from whom all blessings flow” is not a line for people who arrived at their blessings by their own effort. It’s a line for people who received something. The apostle Paul put the same question more bluntly: “What do you have that you did not receive?” The man who buried his talent didn’t lose it because he was wicked; he lost it because he was afraid, and fear made him useless.
The candidate at my door wasn’t being asked to apologize for his education. He was being asked what he planned to do with it.
There are, of course, situations where you shouldn’t identify yourself with Punahou. When you’re bodyboarding at Sandys and you drop in on an uncle and he starts yelling, don’t bring up Obama. Don’t answer when Uncle asks what school you went to. No need to start singing "O‘ahu a, O‘ahu a, Punahou, our Punahou." Just say sorry and keep it moving.
That’s not shame. That’s just reading the room.
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