I just thought her article essentially was rather empty, and it really wasn't as sensational as all the blurbs in the previous newspapers made it out to be. It was just very wishy-washy. She didn't really make any conclusions by the end of it, and she invalidated just about everything she said, by informing us that perhaps her perspective is stuck in the 80s. She starts off by saying she wouldn't put her daughter in RGS, when she doesn't even have a daughter to speak of, and then she decides that the point is not to base a decision on academics. And it turns out her current introspection about this is because of her nephew, a BOY, which really has nothing to do with rgs. With practically every paragraph, she adds a sort of disclaimer like she's trying not to have RGS girls bawling for her blood. Which I guess is a valid attempt, because right not there are organised endeavours to do just that.

The title is rather telling. Laments of a girl from RGS? It seems like she's trying to tell us that RGS is really overrated, that in fact her experience was a bad one. She says that her RGS friends turned out to be wholesome, productive citizens. Isn't that the point? If they're wholesome then they're well-rounded and have good qualities besides intelligence haven’t they? That may just be a nitpick over her choice of words, but the article overall manages to reflect that she doesn't realy know what she's talking about.

I actually don't see what the hell she's trying to say with her article. She says that the ex-RGS girls have a deep-seated urge to achieve, and be competitive, but why is that a bad thing? Besides the mere one-line reference to intellectual snobbery, that we judge people by their intelligence. Besides looks, intellect is really the next thing you judge about a person isn't it? Judging emotional quotient or whatever else takes time and is harder is evaluate, and in fact people from other schools do often end up judging people more shallowly, by the way they look. So I don’t see the problem with judging somebody by intelligence, as long as we don’t look down on others for having it in a lesser quantity. What I do think is that we’re less patient with people who don’t understand things as quickly as we do, which is something Daph was talking about the other day. She said that she’s afraid that people at Concord will be thick, and that they won’t get any of her jokes. I think maybe a point she should have made is that some sort of intellectual elite is formed, but this isn’t so much the fault of the RGS girls as the fault of system which segregates students based almost purely on exam results.

It feels like her whole going on about the feminity of MGS girls and their marriageability was a pretty big point that she wanted to bring up, and that's kinda sad because that's hardly a modern concern. Stuck in the past, again, and then she says that SCGS girls anyway tell her that the family background is important too. It's just a stupid thing to bring up, in my opinion. And if she wants her daughters to be stable and fully developed individuals, then she should worry more about who they become and not who ends up wanting to marry them. We apparently judge people by their intellect, yet she seems to want to judge by marriageability, and it's hypocritical that she's writing this article while at the same time judging OUR intellect.

At the beginning, when I saw all the sensational lead-ins in the previous papers, I was all set to write in. But when I read the article on Sunday, I thought it was disappointingly empty and didn't really merit a response at all. But it's great that people are writing in, if only to point out that we not only disagree with her but also that her arguments are terribly flawed. Though pointing everything is also a sign perhaps of our intellectual snobbery or something.