England or America?

Madonna and Guy Ritchie are at logger-heads over where Lourdes should go to school: here, or in America? I'm rooting for Guy, who wants Madge's 11-year-old daughter from her relationship with a fitness trainer to attend an English school.

American schools are parochial, stressful and conformist. I should know. Until I was 17 I attended National Cathedral School, a private girls' school down the road from Sidwell Friends, where President Obama's daughters have just been admitted. (NCS girls, I have to admit, looked down their nose at Sidwell: we got more students into Ivy League colleges than they did, which is what counts in American education.)

The school had fabulous grounds and high-profile students — Senator Kennedy's daughter, Madeleine Albright's twins. But there were only two or three students from ethnic minorities in my year, and two foreigners. We were pitied for not being American, and teased for having "unpronounceable" names: even my five-lettered last name was deemed too tricky. (God knows how they would have mangled "Inayat Bunglawala".)

The "history" on the syllabus was exclusively American. You could graduate knowing the Gettysburg address and the date of the Boston Tea Party; but it was not until she went to Yale that a friend of mine came across Napoleon and realised Waterloo was not just an Abba song. "English literature" was limited to American classics: JD Salinger and John Steinbeck. Dickens and Austen were optional.

There was stress — lots of it. Girls and teachers worked in a pressure-cooker environment that produced some high-flyers but also girls with eating disorders or on a diet of hash browns.

At the end of the arduous obstacle course, the all-important SATs exams left no room for imaginative thinking or stylistic flair. You simply ticked multiple-choice boxes and conformed to standardised answers.

St Clare's Hall, in Oxford, proved a revelation. When I arrived at 17 I felt like I'd pulled up the shutters to look out onto a big wide world. The many international students, Asians and blacks, had interests in life beyond the Channel.

I relished the wider syllabus and exams based on essays that allowed argument, analysis and a bit of personality.

Pressure was part of everyday life, just as in America: there were plenty of anorexics, druggies and Lolitas. But the conformist mentality was not endemic, which gave you some breathing space.

Madge, let Lourdes stay. She'll thank you for it — and be able to pronounce Ciccone.