Opinion: Academic ‘boot camp’ for 4-year-olds? The American Dream is truly dead.

This is why they hate us on the East Coast: According to an article in The Times that seems written for the sole purpose of angering bootstrap-pullers like me, parents can set aside two or three minutes’ worth of the salary required to live on the Westside and send their kids to a weeklong “boot camp” in Santa Monica so they can be spared the humiliation of starting kindergarten not knowing how to get in line or sit in a circle.

The service, which charges $1,000 per week, appears to primarily target parents who’d like to send their kids to private kindergartens that do horrible things such as subject children who just recently shed their diapers to a school admissions process. Surely there are pre-schools and kindergartens that charge obscene amounts (they call it “tuition”) found in metropolitan areas outside Los Angeles, but The Times’ article includes an aside that dials up the contempt for our Southern California lifestyle: Boot-camp trainees are offered organic snacks — undoubtedly a perk that parents of fewer means would happily accept on behalf of their children — but “many brought their own food because of dietary restrictions.”

(I don’t even want to ask what the vaccination rate is.)

It’s easy to poke fun at parents who would spend $200 an hour on private tutors for small children (I just did it!), but the article also provides a window into the insidiousness of inequality in this country today. It’s bad enough that public financing of higher education, formerly the great equalizer of opportunity for all (at least in California), has reached a historic low, but to think that some parents “care” enough to give their brood a leg up two or so years after they start walking is enough to make even the most ardent Bernie Sanders supporter go home out of frustration.

This is not an argument for universal preschool, the benefits of which tend to be oversold (for the record, my two 4-year-olds attend a preschool that takes from us about as much per month as our mortgage lender). This is an appeal for well-to-do fathers and mothers today to start changing their attitudes — to stop acting as if “parenting” is a competition in which their children are expensive racehorses bred and fed to succeed almost immediately after birth.

A generation ago, surely the parents of millennials could not foresee the death match that college admissions would become, with expensive test preparation and after-school tutoring services effectively rigging admissions systems that were designed to be based on merit (ostensibly, at least). But a personal anecdote reveals how far we’ve come, and not in a good way: About a year ago, at a park in South Pasadena — a city that seems to exist solely so rich people can say they send their kids to public school — a mother to whom I had lamented that finding a preschool with room for my kids felt like applying to Harvard replied, with dead seriousness, “In so many ways, preschool is more important than college.”

Hey, it’s her money. But how much earlier into toddlerdom will the next generation of parents make their kids start crawling up the ladder? And I say crawling because at this rate, kids will soon need to start before they will have learned to walk.

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