The biggest difference I noticed between public and private school kids was confidence. As a bit of background, I went to a public ie. state school in the UK and out of 300 kids in my year, I was one out of 5 who made it to university. That's not because I was with a bunch of dummies; just that the teaching wasn't great and more importantly kids from a working class background weren't expected to be able/want to go to uni. At that time 93% of UK kids were educated in state schools but only made up 50% of the university population. This was about 20 years ago though so I'm sure things have improved since then.

So having mixed with a lot of private school kids at uni, I was really amazed to find that they weren't any brighter than most of the kids I went to school with. They had just been better trained for exams and were full of confidence that their opinion mattered. When I got to Australia most of my XH's friends were from private school backgrounds and the same thing applied - they were filled with confidence. And confidence gets you a long way!

I must say I used to be a bit of a snob about people's education levels in the "well if I can get two degrees when my mum was a cleaner and my dad was a car sprayer then anyone can" mould. Now having had much more life experience, the people who fascinate me the most are the ones who are self-taught. I have, over the years, become very lazy about learning new things because I think my head basically got 'full' at uni; whereas my partner left (actually was expelled) from school at 16 and is much more knowledgeable about the world than I am with his head constantly in Noam Chomsky, The Economist or The Age.