This past Monday morning I kneeled down on a flagstone sidewalk to tell my four-year-old son that he was going to be just fine going in to his new summer day camp. It was his first day at this new camp clear across town: We had driven for 35 minutes past the metal-shuttered liquor stores and bus stops and the National Rehabilitation Hospital, past groves of identical Georgian houses up the hill to the expansive private school where the camp was being held.

Once we were there, he hung back from going inside. My son is a spirited, occasionally obstreperous little boy, but on this morning, his big blue eyes were filled with pellucid tears. Let’s go home, Mama, he kept saying.

I, however, was imminently required to be at my part-time office. The camp’s cadre of polite teenage assistants, supervised by staff with master’s degrees, eventually enticed him to go inside and find out what “Ocean Week” was all about.

Now, the camp itself is an unpretentious, all-in-jolly-good-fun kind of place. But it’s not just OK; it’s actually good—a rarity in a preschool educational landscape where so much for so many is substandard. As I was walking back to the car, through this vast, tree-filled and utterly quiet plot of land right in the middle of the city, I worried about whether I was falling prey to a common ailment among some of middle- and upper-middle class peers here where I live, what I’d call “Master-of-the-Universe” syndrome—that ladder that starts with private preschool application essays and ends up with unpaid summer internships in college. That quest for dominance, as we know, never ends.

So far, we’ve avoided that trend for the most part. We live in a multi-class, multi-racial neighborhood where education and simplicity are valued (the overeducated and underpaid), and my son’s regular preschool is a little Montessori that operates on Dorothy Day Catholic principles—a real jewel of a place for which I would just about give my life.

But amid the luxuriant hush of trees where the camp was being held, I thought that I would probably do just about anything to make sure that my son feels at home in places like these as well. While I have certain doubts about the fake sprezzatura I developed in my own scholarship-aided private education—which has gotten me nowhere, frankly—I want my son to know that he can go anywhere and feel just as good as anyone.

So much militates against the notion of the average and the ordinary, but it is sad to me that it should be so. Last Christmas, my son went through a passion for a line of toys called “Mighty World” that features action play sets with small, finely detailed figures and accessories. For the Police theme, there’s “Jake the Motorcycle Officer” and “Ramon the K-9 cop” (he even looks Latino); the Construction theme includes both “Ben the Flagman” and even, unbelievably, “Jessie the Street Cleaner.” There are bakery and store themes, and even a small army.

All of the toys’ promotional materials highlight the importance of the individual working for the good of the community—the good old social contract—and they have been born out in the police and fire dramas that my son has played on the bedroom carpet.

Mighty World does not, at this writing, have play sets for “hedge fund manager” or “petroleum industry lobbyist.”

I mean it when I say that I would be perfectly happy for my son to be a firefighter or a police officer. But I also want him to read Christopher Marlowe, to see The Magic Flute, to read the Gospel of John in Greek, and I want none of these things to be stigmatized as elitist or “rich” activities.

I only wish it didn’t seem—and I do believe it really is just “seem”—as though I had to choose. What happened to the days of Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, alma mater to Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond, where I’m told that the working class sons and daughters of immigrants studied Greek and Latin?

But the dangers of not going beyond the neighborhood are also real: In the magnificent Edward P. Jones story “The Store,” a young African-American man in Washington, D.C. takes a job in a neighborhood corner store that becomes both his window onto the neighborhood scene and, as he works harder and harder, his means of escape once that neighborhood is poisoned for him.

The last image of the story is of the narrator taking the bus across Rock Creek Park—once the great divider between black and white Washington, though no more—and entering Georgetown.

It’s roughly the same route I’ll take in about an hour.