Boarding Private Schools

Schools, where pupils board, is a British idea and they are still most popular in the UK. Boarding private schools operate in the United States too and in old outposts of the British Empire, such as India. They started as charity schools in the 12th century and then became fee paying. Teachers were normally clergymen until the 19th century and they were a favorite option for British parents who were posted overseas. The schools offered the opportunity for their children to receive an education and way of life from the mother country.

There are schools that accept children from a very young age but most pupils attend between the ages of 13 - 18. Younger children, aged 9 -12 years old sometimes enroll at preparatory boarding private schools but this is not as fashionable as it once was. Many countries use the British schools as a template for how they should be run. Parents send their children to these schools for many reasons. If they have a job in which they move around a lot, it gives a permanent base for the child, rather than repeatedly changing schools. Generations of families often go to the same school, carrying on family tradition.

This type of education has been controversial amongst people who oppose it. Many pupils speak of being unhappy and homesick. Others take to the life with enthusiasm. Certainly, the facilities are excellent, with more expensive boarding private schools having first class sporting opportunities and the best technology. Some even have their own squash courts and cinemas.

Pastoral care should be as important as academic standards and sporting achievement. For many children, breaking away from a family home life can be very difficult. The schools are divided into Houses, with each one having a housemaster or housemistress to look after the pupils. The Matron performs housekeeping duties and the House Tutors are there to assist pupils with their studies. Prefects within the student body are instructed to maintain discipline.

A typical school house will contain dormitories for sleeping in, a library and school chapel. There will also be a common room, in which pupils can relax in their free time. There are plenty out of school hours activities, such as amateur dramatic groups, chess clubs, debating societies or fencing clubs. Boarding private schools have often featured in novels and films. Much of the story in the Harry Potter books and movies takes place at a boarding school. This has had an unexpected consequence, as the numbers of enrollments for these schools in the UK has greatly increased!

Private Boarding Schools

One thing I have never understood is boarding private schools. I know there are great schools out there, and there are many parents who want their children to get the best education they can get, but I wonder about the wisdom of being separated from your children for long stretches of time. While I don?t think children should be coddled or anything like that, I do think they benefit from the security of their families. Is a child who is sent away to boarding private schools lonely and independent at too young of an age?

There are many great advantages to sending your child to a school like this, but you do have to have the money to do so. Many families don?t, and I think this is why they are not nearly as common as regular private schools. When you send your child to boarding private schools, they stay there much of the school year, but come home for breaks, much like a college student. I?m not sure a child under 18 is ready for that, and I don?t know if that?s the best thing for them, even if they are getting a great education. There are other places to get the same learning, and you don?t have to miss your child so much, and you don?t have to worry that the boarding private school is instilling values in your child that you might not like.

A child can learn a lot from boarding private schools, and much of that has nothing to do with education. They are probably getting the best from their teachers, but are they learning that their parents are not there for them? Are they learning that they have to be independent when they are not emotionally ready to do so? Those are questions that each parents has to answer when they decide to send their child to such a school. I?m not sure anyone knows the answers, but they are things to consider.

If you really want to send your child to boarding private schools, you should be aware that you may have to send them far from home. That means that if something goes wrong that you might not be able to be there for them. They may learn to think they can rely only on themselves, and you have to decide if that is a good lesson. Independence is great, but humans are meant to live in families, and it is good to know that our family is there. Make sure you strike a good balance if you send them for this education, and make every moment you are together count.

Boarding Schhols

One of the funny things about boarding high schools is that they usually serve one extreme or another. There is no such thing as a typical boarding high school. As a matter of fact, the only thing that unites high school boarding programs is that they cost a lot of money. You see, some boarding schools are meant to prepare the children of the rich to be the inheritors of the future. They are called college preparatory schools, and they are extremely difficult. Meanwhile, other ones are practically military high schools. They are meant for dropouts and delinquents, designed to whip them into shape and turn them into productive members of society. Don't get me wrong ? the latter will get you a good education but the people enrolled are totally different and the philosophy is very strict.

The boarding high school I went to, however, was one of the only ones that actually straddled the line. It wasn't quite a military high school, but it was close. I have never seen such a strange mix of students, and yet at the time I took it totally for granted. About half of the kids there were extremely high achievers from very prominent families, while the other half were delinquents. When I first got there, I was a little bit scared of some of the kids in the boarding school. It seemed like a terrible environment for a small, weak kid like me to be put into. I figured that I would be picked on every single day. To my surprise, however, that never happened. The boarding high school would not tolerate that kind of behavior. Things were so strict that people got the message pretty quickly: bullying was out of the question.
At the time, I was furious with my parents for sending me to a boarding high school. My older brother had gone to a Montessori high school, and they had let him do practically anything he wanted. It seemed unjust for me to be sent to boarding high schools when my brother got so much more of a permissive environment. I had to leave my friends behind for the entire school year, and put up with disciplinarian teachers shouting at me at every turn. In the end, however, I was grateful for my parent's decision to send me to that boarding high school. It taught me discipline, something that my older brother never learned in his Montessori school.