Boarding 3hrs Day 7hrs Public 7hrs
(source: TABS/Art & Science Group, 2003)
PERCEPTIONS AND MISPERCEPTIONS
Over its history, the boarding school world has had a disproportionate presence in popular culture. Tom Brown’s School Days, an 1856 novel set at England’s Rugby School, was wildly popular in the mid to late 19th century and has been credited for initiating American interest in English style schools. Owen Johnson’s boarding school novellas, now known collectively as The Lawrenceville Stories, and a collegiate sequel, Stover at Yale, further intrigued the reading public in the early twentieth century. Later novels included James Hilton’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips and John Knowles’ A Separate Peace. Roald Dahl brought a contrarian view with Boy, a series of stories about his unhappy days at British boarding schools. Hollywood has brought the boarding world to the general public with a string of films. The Harry Potter films, based on the novels of J. K. Rowling, are the best known boarding school stories of all time, with worldwide distribution in scores of languages.
The modern fascination with celebrity is another source of information about boarding schools which are known for their alumni, many of whom have gone on to fame as politicians, movie stars, and titans of business. News media also bring public awareness, often of a negative sort, since they tend to report on boarding schools on occasions when bad news occurs.
This aggregate cultural history has given rise to a number of myths, often contradictory:
“Boarding schools are only for rich kids.”
Due to their very high tuitions, boarding schools enroll numerous full pay students from wealthy families. Nevertheless, these schools include students of all economic backgrounds due to the schools’ huge amounts of financial aid. Many schools have over 70% of their students on financial aid. Some are “need blind” and provide significant financial aid, sometimes including 100% tuition plus funding for computers, books, and travel, to families who demonstrate need. This largesse supports tuition grants to students across the economic spectrum, including students from middle class families who often qualify for much more financial aid at boarding schools than they can get from universities.
“Boarding schools are only for delinquents and troublemakers.”
Some boarding schools focus on teens with major emotional and psychological issues. The “therapeutic” schools are only one category of boarding school; the large majority are college preparatory schools with a wide variety of specialties, including single sex schools, coed schools, schools focused on learning challenges, church schools, military schools, and equestrian schools. The list is long.
“Boarding schools are not diverse and exclude minorities.”
This was certainly true in the two hundred and fifty year past history of American prep schools, but now the trend is strongly in the opposite direction. Enrollment of students of color reaches 40-45% in many schools. Schools also promote instructional programs in diversity, hold on-campus religious services from many faiths, and promote social tolerance.
“All boarding schools are harsh, cold, and cruel, like a Dickens novel.”
Many nineteenth century American boarding schools sought to model themselves after British schools, where hazing, bullying, and corporal punishment were accepted customs until only recently. A current community of British ex-boarding school students, Boarding School Survivors, claiming permanent emotional and psychological damage from their school experiences, campaigns against British boarding schools and boarding schools in general, tarring all with the brush of their own experience.
Modern American boarding schools are a far cry from the antique British model, or indeed from what American schools once were. Today, student well-being is a top priority, with professional support from advisors, tutors, trainers, and health, dietary, psychological, and time management specialists. With extensive recreational and sports facilities, executive chefs for the dining halls, and school organic farms raising meat, dairy and produce for the dining halls, many schools are so fully equipped they are described as “country clubs with classrooms”.
“You have to be an A+ student to attend boarding schools.”
Another falsehood – the wide range of schools and academic programs means there’s a place for every student who seeks a boarding experience, regardless of classroom success.
“A boarding school education is a sure fire route to getting into Ivy League colleges”
At one time in the 19th and 20th centuries, there was correlative data that would support this false conclusion, as certain boarding schools served as “feeder schools” to elite colleges and universities. The truth was that the admission rates from certain schools and elite colleges had much more to do with family connections than it did with the schools themselves. Now that diversity is the watchword for college admissions officers, boarding school success in college admissions, though stronger on a percentage basis than any other school category, is much lower than in decades past. Mere attendance at a boarding school is no guarantee of admission to elite colleges, nor, in truth, was it ever so.
“Boarding schools are degenerate cesspools of drugs and sexual abuse.”
This canard is fostered by the media’s dictum that the only news is bad news; boarding schools and prep schools in general rarely appear in the news unless something negative happens. News of misbehavior and criminal activity, especially sexual abuse, is widely reported. Despite this, statistics indicate that misbehavior at these schools is neither frequent nor widespread.
“Boarding schools are hopelessly archaic and out of step with today’s world.”
Historically, the leading boarding schools have been and are still at the cutting edge of modern educational techniques; they participated in the creation of Advanced Placement and SAT tests and the conference style of teaching, also known as the Harkness Method. Prep schools in general and boarding schools in particular have been quick to adopt proven pedagogical and technological advances.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AMERICAN BOARDING SCHOOLS
The development of American boarding schools centers on two fundamental questions: how to prepare the next generation of American leadership, and from where should those young leaders come? In tandem with this ongoing concern is a through line of cultural assumptions and expectations that stretches back to the earliest days of American boarding schools and continues on to this day.
Early Days - 1760s – 1840s
In colonial times, the education of the young was a matter exclusively for the highest classes. Tutors were employed to teach both boys and girls to read and write. Formal education, which consisted of Greek, Latin, rhetoric, logic, and mathematics, was given to the boys, or at minimum the eldest boy of a family. Girls’ education combined academics with social skills and the arts.
Only a handful of boarding schools, known as “academies” operated in colonial times. The term “academy” harkens back to ancient Greece and Plato’s original school and has had very different meanings in different eras and cultures. In early America, an academy was understood to mean private tuition boarding secondary schools situated in towns or cities or immediately bordering them; they were not isolated or secluded. Virtually all were single sex, primarily boys’ schools, though schools for girls also arose. Students boarded in private homes; gradually schools began to provide dormitory housing. Maryland’s West Nottingham Academy was founded in 1744; Linden Hall, a school for girls in Pennsylvania, was founded in 1746; the Governor’s Academy in Massachusetts, was founded in 1763, and North Carolina’s Salem Academy, also a girl’s school, began in 1772. All four flourish today. Other academies followed in the Revolutionary and post Revolutionary eras – Phillips Academy (Andover, MA), Phillips Exeter (NH), Deerfield (MA), Fryeburg (ME), Washington (ME), Cheshire (CT), Blair (NJ), Lawrence (MA), Milton (MA), Suffield (CT), Lincoln