What are you willing to give up in order to gain something? A lot of decisions in life are determined by this question. So many people give up one thing they love every day just to get something else they think they want. Take deciding what friends you want to hang out with when you get two invitations, for example, or deciding what flavor of ice cream you want at the local sweet shop. Every decision adds up – we make them every day.

High school is one example that we can’t avoid. Just the choice of deciding whether or not you want to go to public or private high school weighs in your options a ton. If you wanted to go to public school, would you feel challenged enough to push yourself in academics, or would you only do the minimum work? If you went to a private high school, would you be able to keep up with the work and your fellow classmates? These questions you would have to consider don’t even cover all the questions that one student would have to think about when deciding what kind of academic atmosphere they would wish to live in.

Students would most likely want to go to a public high school because they would want a regular high school experience and more importantly, they would want to stay with their friends. It wouldn’t even matter if these students were intelligent because they would think about more of their personal reasons to stay in a public school system, if they had been in both a public elementary and middle school. Public high schools aren’t as bad as some people would view them – a lot offer honors programs and extra curriculum activities. It’s how these schools choose to get students to a point to where they would want to learn and apply what they know to how they learn in the future.

Having private schools as options is another idea that students have to think about. They have to know what the difference would be between a public and private high school. Would the final decision on where a student would want to attend school out of these options be just the fact alone of which type of schooling fits them best? Attending a private school, for example, would mean that students would have so many choices on what classes they would want to take – private schools generally have a lot more options than public school. On the whole, the campus community would be smaller, and everyone in a class would know each other. In a lot of private schools, there would also be the option of boarding. Would these reasons excite students to go into private schooling? Yes, but again, the options would have to reflect the student’s personality.

This whole idea ties into the whole question of what someone is willing to give up. If a student chooses to go to a private high school, what really pushes them to that choice? Is it that they want a better education? Do they have the money to attend? Do they like the lifestyle better? It could be any one of these questions. But, if you think about it, the student would have to give up a lot. First of all, he or she would no longer be around the same people as they were before. They would have to meet a whole new group of students and teachers. A student would also have to give up their identity. What everyone else in their old school knew them by wouldn’t matter anymore – they’d have to start fresh. The student would have to learn a whole new way of life, because homework and class work would be much harder than it was before. Would a student actually be willing to give that up?

In the end, it all comes out to a big decision. Students have to learn to make their own choices and they have to know what the action/reaction will be. They have to know how decisions like high school possibilities benefit themselves, as also how they hurt them.