Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology

 Here is an interesting article in the Washington Post by a student who attended the Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology in Fairfax County, the best technical public high school in the land. The author made the most of the education opportunity presented but laments that the school hasn't kept up with the changing demographics of our nation as represented by the population current makeup of the county and suggests that it would have been better to attend a local public high school for a better life experience which would or could have led to a more productive and rewarding life.

This is interesting to me since my oldest child attended TJ for four years and certainly would have had a more productive or at least a more rewarding life if he had attended a local high school in the city of Falls Church or the county of Arlington instead. He squandered his magnificent opportunity by attending this school (which was his choice because he could have otherwise attended an elite top-ten boarding prep school, Lawrenceville, perhaps the Stanford of high school education instead), staggered out of TJ with the bottom high school diploma of three grades in Virginia (about equal to a GED diploma after four years at the premiere public technical school in the nation), a general diploma rather than a regular  high school diploma or a magnet school diploma. This was during the multi-year, quarter-million-dollar divorce engineered by his mother during which, in my opinion, her covert narcissistic predilections overcame the immature wills of our three minor children through the perpetuation of PAS (which many persons knowledgeable of its pernicious scourge label a form of child abuse) for her own petty personal aggrandizement of her sense of her self.

Our oldest child, a talented, bold, smart, athletic pre-teen, a mega-achiever when pushed or nurtured, never went to college after being let out of TJ with his shop-class diploma, and lapsed into internet gambling, being a boy-Friday for the scumbag divorce lawyer who took his "case" to sue his father for fiduciary breach during the divorce (the case was thrown out of court, with sanctions assessed) and perpetrating ever-incomplete schemes on go-fund-me pages.  In his foisted-upon bitterness as a child (by her coterie of mercenary adult "professionals"), the lad, now a fully mature adult, changed his name, lived I think at his mother's next husband's residence and hasn't communicated with any Lamberton (the name he eschewed on his 18th birthday) for over fifteen years.

So I think the article's author might be right.  The experience my oldest child received at TJ wasn't representative of any child's that I know of, when I was effectively shut out of any involvement by TJ of any involvement (or even discussion, really) of my child's continuing high school education by TJ administrators who absolutely adhered aggressively to the fallacious, sexist common principle prevalent in domestic law that "mother knows best."  I'm sorry for you, Jimmy; perhaps TJ wasted your life; instead you could have gone to Yorktown like your brothers who both graduated from VCU, or Lawrenceville where your grandfather (Carleton, Yale Law School), your uncle (Yale, Wharton MBA), and I went (CU, UVA Law School).