Jessica Winter:

When my daughter was little, I became fixated on a schoolhouse a few blocks from our apartment—a Tudor-style storybook cottage, with red trim and a brick chimney and a playground all of wood. Its first-floor windows were concealed by tall bushes of a deep impossible green, and everything that a childhood should be was waiting for my daughter behind them, or so I believed. When I went inside, my expectations were met. The children, aged two to six, were serious and serene, occasionally speaking to each other in low, considerate tones. They stacked blocks, strung beads, and arranged letter boards, and of course I had seen these kinds of blocks and beads and boards before, but never these specific, exquisite renderings of them. When it was time for “walking on the line”—a morning custom in which the children followed a line of tape on the floor, around and around, silent and judiciously spaced—I felt overcome by a sense of dazed compliance.

This was our local Montessori school, and I had convinced myself that, with a bit of scrimping and bootstrapping, I could somehow find the money to send my daughter there. I scheduled her required interview; afterward, the director told me, “Oh, she’s a dream,” and in that moment I would have signed a Sea Org contract in exchange for a year of my kid’s enrollment. But when I reviewed the numbers, the following weekend, I concluded that I could pay the tuition only if I went into credit-card debt—and, really, if that qualifies as being able to “afford” something, what can’t you afford? I withdrew her application, and, to self-soothe, I bought a Montessori-ish hundred-piece counting board for her off Amazon. (She barely touched it, and I gave it away after her toddler brother expressed an interest in eating the numbers.)