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When I was a teen, in a smallish town in the Midwest, high school began in 10th grade and there was only one high school. You went there, got a job at a gas station or hung out in front of the pool hall smoking Marlboro reds. Those were our options.

But in San Francisco we have choices. What do you want, Mr. and Mrs. Concerned Parent? Public or private? Expensive or cheap? Jesuits or Rudolf Steiner? College prep or art-intensive? Global or personal? Freewheeling or disciplined? Diverse or exclusive? Religious or secular? Democrat or Republican? Computer skills or pottery? It's a cornucopia of choices, a pedagogical feast. Unfortunately, there's only food enough for 10, and there are a thousand hungry minds in line.

This fall, my daughter, my former wife and I attended the San Francisco High School Fair, an event that is supposed to help us make the right choice. I don't know what we expected to find. I guess I hoped for some festivity -- pig races, prize-winning vegetables, a fun house, a merry-go-round. Instead, I found myself in a sea of parents and gawky young people with braces; the only roller coasters in evidence were emotional ones.

Every private high school within a 50-mile radius was represented at the event, along with a smattering of "alternative" public high schools, each with folding tables lined up in a generic middle-school gymnasium. Some tables were piled high with brochures; some just had stacks of single photocopied sheets. (A fellow parent remarked, correctly, that the glossiness of a school's brochure bore a direct correlation to the height of its tuition.)

The high schools that chose not to present themselves at this event were, of course, the high schools that none of us wanted -- the dreaded public schools so loathed by pundits of every stripe. They were the default schools, you might say, the ones our children would have to attend if we stood by and did nothing -- the overcrowded, troubled schools administrated by idiots and attended by drug addicts and snipers. Their very absence at the high school fair amounted to a presence of sorts, like unseen barbarian hordes hunkered over the frozen border during the final days of the Roman Empire.

We clutched our brochures, talismans against this vast, invisible malignant force. I'm no psychic, but it wasn't difficult to know what thoughts were rushing through our teeming brains: The teachers in these default schools are lifers who don't care about their students unless they set off the metal detectors. Their edifices are held together by duct tape and their infrastructures are dependent on the whims of those who choose to play the California lottery.

Teachers in these places must pay for their own supplies. If a student feels bad about failing a class, that student will be passed anyway, just to boost his or her self-esteem.

And there are no prayers in these schools, no values. Students will be forced to read only obscure, poorly written books by persons of color. Mark Twain's oeuvre and Shakespeare's efforts will be thrown in the dumpster. Our children will learn nothing and will be sent off into the world armed with half-formed ideas gleaned from television programs. They will have an inflated sense of self-worth with no foundation in reality.

That is our nightmare, with slight variations depending on politics, about the public school system. And here, at the high school fair, under the high banks of fluorescent lights, our alternatives to the educratic dystopia had gathered.

Clutching our protective brochures, we formed a huge sluggish stream that flowed out the doors of the auditorium to the various classrooms, where the representatives of better high schools would pitch the pedagogies that would be our salvation.

Being more than a little debt-ridden, my preference (gasp!) was for a public school, but we attended presentations by several private schools just so we could feel, for a fleeting moment anyway, as though we were among the beneficiaries of the new Internet economy.

Our first stop was the presentation by the exclusive CitiZen High School (not its real name). The admissions director greeted us and told us a little bit about CitiZen's educational philosophy, which was to provide students with an inspirational environment and foster self-motivation and enthusiasm.

Four seniors had accompanied her, as case studies, I suppose. The cutest one, who bore a striking resemblance to the young Ricky Nelson, wanted to be a doctor. The others were cute too, in a vaguely self-satisfied, humorless way. They reminded me of a Gap ad, or the cast of "Dawson's Creek." You could see soap operas erupting around their stylish dreamy heads. They seemed self-motivated, all right, but not very enthusiastic.

Then we attended the pitch for Kwick Preparatory. (All of these names are false, by the way.) I'd heard good things about this private school, which was introduced with much pep and perkiness by its admissions director.

Again, two students were trotted out. Now these kids were enthusiastic and self-motivated. An undernourished hyperkinetic girl gave us an oration that sounded roughly like this: "I'm editing the yearbook, teaching myself how to play the oboe, mastering the Kwick Web site, taking calculus, early English literature, advanced physics and wood shop. In my spare time, I'm tutoring freshmen and teaching them time and stress management."

From the conversations overheard after the session, I found that most parents were excited about this school, which promised to fill their children's days with so much work they wouldn't have time to become crack addicts. But a couple of us noted that these children seemed to be on the verge of massive nervous breakdowns.

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