Reading Nathan‘s and Theodore‘s accounts of trying to get their kids into public pre-K programs is, frankly, terrifying. Who spends $28,000 on preschool?

But for me it’s also abstract—my Sasha’s only just over a year old, so my encounter with this nightmare is at least, what, six months off? Right now we’re just trying to manage Sasha’s transition from full-time nanny care to full-time outside-the-home day care. I’ll let you know how that goes next month, when it begins.

But in the meantime, I will imagine the future. And when I look into my crystal ball, I see… neither public nor private school. That is, neither one in this country.

See, I’ve got an out: in-laws in Taipei who would be only too glad to have us move back in with them. Honestly, from a convenience point of view, this would be awesome. My wife’s parents are doctors, we’d pay no rent, we’d have a cook, and—oh, yeah—the elementary school that Sasha would go to is just behind their house. Going there is a family tradition, too. Jean, her mother, and even her grandmother all went there. I’m not big on tradition, but even that seems pretty cool.

Would going to school in Taiwan be a good thing? To my mind, yes. Of course, I like it that Sasha would get a good grounding in Chinese, and that she’d get the good-Asian-student discipline instilled in her from the beginning. Apparently, there’s no janitor, so the kids are responsible for cleaning the classrooms, the toilets, the blackboards. As the lazy-ass child of a liberal education system, I naturally think that’s pretty cool.

There are, however, friends of Jean’s who say Taiwanese schools are bad. They limit creativity, teach kids pure rote learning, and produce automatons. But it’s not like we’ll keep Sasha in these schools forever, and Jean herself turned out fine, so I’m not worried.

The alternative, I guess, is that we enroll Sasha in that very same liberal education system I grew up in—in Amherst, Massachusetts. Yeah, we could move there, though I don’t know what kind of work we’d do, or whether the Kafkaesque process for applying to the Amherst Regional School system is any less frightening than New York’s.

Or: Is it all really so bad? I hear a lot of people fret about having to send their kids to Staten Island for preschool, but the horror stories are mostly about the application process, not the results. Or maybe we’ll get those next fall, when JP and Dalia start making new little friends in East New York.

From our friends at Dad-Blogs.com, a heads-up that Dr. Laura Schlessinger has said something achingly stupid and anachronistic. It wouldn’t be the first time.

“Doctor” Laura (not an M.D., but a Ph.D, in rat physiology, no less) has made a career out of pseudo-scientific renderings of what is essentially a worldview stolen from outdated romance novels. Men are “warriors,” “heroes,” “rescuers”; women need to “satisfy” them in order to be satisfied.

Not surprising, then, that she does not agree with men who become too involved with their children. Decide for yourselves.

We’re don’t do much kid-dialog here at DadWagon (we prefer to leave that sort of thing to Sweet Juniper, who has a fine eye for the detail of juvenile repartee).

But here it is anyhow: Yesterday evening, when Nico, who’s almost 2, was being put to bed, Dalia got serious, in the way that 4-year-olds do. She announced she had something to tell me:

• “I’m going to get married.”
• “Who are you gonna marry?”
• “Nico.”
• “That’s your brother”
• “I love him. We’re going to own babies.”
• “How many babies?”
• “My belly will be all full of them.”
• “How many babies?”
• “Two babies. A boy and a girl.”
• “What are their names going to be?”
• “Zoë and Doodah. They are gonna get married to each other too. And they will own babies.”

Who needs private school? My daughter has already apparently learned the ways of the great European royal houses. What I didn’t really feel like explaining last night, though, is just what happens when that inbreeding party comes crashing to a diseased little halt, as it surely will. From the UK’s Independent, in a discussion of “Hapsburg lip” and the last, sickly scion of the inbred House of Hapsburg:

Charles II not only suffered an extreme version of the Hapsburg lip, his tongue was said to be so big for his mouth that he had difficulty speaking and drooled. He also suffered from an oversized head, intestinal upsets, convulsions and, according to his first wife, premature ejaculation.

“He was unable to speak until the age of four, and could not walk until the age of eight. He was short, weak and quite lean and thin. He was described as a person showing very little interest in his surroundings,” Professor Alvarez said. “He looked like an old person when he was 30 years old, suffering edemas [swellings] on his feet, legs, abdomen and face. During the last years of his life he could barely stand up and suffered from hallucinations and convulsive episodes,” he said.

A message, then, to the future: Zoë and Doodah, I know your parents are brother and sister. But you must break the cycle. If you have to, marry Christopher’s grandchildren. They will be Greek or something, so that should be different enough.

Despite vast differences in intellectual heft (he wins) and hairline (I win), DadWagoner Theodore and I do have something in common: we are both caught in the maw of the New York public school “universal” pre-K bureaucracy.

Theodore complained righteously about the lack of available spaces, but it’s even worse than he wrote, because you’re not guaranteed a spot in your district until kindergarten (at least according to the hivemind at YouBeMom). For pre-K, you’re only guaranteed a spot somewhere in New York. Which raises the question: how ’bout a 90 minute commute Staten Island each day?

But despite the odds, we will take whichever public school will have us. Dalia was in a private school she loves this past year. They were kind, thoughtful, and progressive. But they just sent a bill for $28,000 for next year’s (full-day) tuition.  It is an astounding amount, and far, far beyond our reach.

I should have known things were gonna get pricey when the school’s headmistress began posting about early childhood education at Huffington Post (no joke). Exposure has a price.

But as sad as we are to be leaving that school (and if you’re a school employee and reading this–we are going to officially turn down the spot tomorrow), I am glad to be getting to public schools finally.

My wife and I were always in public schools, she in Los Angeles, me in a small town (Key West) and a big city (San Francisco). I never liked private school kids. I didn’t really know any, but I projected a lot of my anxieties about money and manners (and my lack thereof) on them. In San Francisco, they seemed so walled-off from the rest of the city, and at such a young age. I just didn’t see myself raising kids in private school.

That’s still true. I don’t understand why people spend a fortune on primary and secondary education. Because the goal is college, right? And if anything, I think going to a fancy prep school can make it more difficult to get into the best colleges. This is debated heavily, and one of the true rock stars of college admissions, Marilee Jones (yeah, I know she had that scandal, but still) wouldn’t admit as much in my interviews with her. But I read between the lines and inferred it a bit, and besides, it’s common sense: If you’re a great student from a hardscrabble public institution, you’re just more impressive than a great student from a silver spoon academy.

It worked for my wife and me, and it’s our plan for our kids.

Staten Island, here we come.