Boarding school

• 1. Introduction

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  Boarding schools have existed for well over a thousand years, and yet the word still carries a charge. It conjures images of stone dormitories, prefects with authority over younger children, and families separated for most of the year. The King's School in Canterbury traces its roots to a monastery school established around 597 AD, making it arguably the oldest boarding school in the world. Winchester College followed in 1382, founded by Bishop William of Wykeham, and Oswestry School in 1407, founded by David Holbache. Both remain in continuous operation today. What does it mean to grow up in an institution that controls not just your schooling but your sleep, your meals, your friendships, and your emotional world? How did this model of education spread from medieval monasteries to every continent? And why do some families pursue it as the highest aspiration, while others see it as a form of displacement? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. How the House System Works

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  Senior teaching staff in a boarding school carry a responsibility that goes by the Latin phrase in loco parentis, meaning in the place of a parent. A single housemaster or housemistress might hold quasi-parental responsibility for anywhere from five to fifty students at any given time. This responsibility covers the hours outside the classroom just as much as the hours inside it.

  The residential house is the structural unit that makes this possible. Houses typically include study-bedrooms or dormitories, a dining room where students eat at fixed times, a library, and common rooms for relaxation. In the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries, the domestic management of each house is overseen by a housekeeper typically known as a matron. In the United States, boarding schools often place a resident family, called dorm parents, inside the dormitory itself.

  Dormitory rules regulate bedtime by age, with a required lights-out time after which no talking is permitted. The source notes that enforcement can be difficult: students find ways around the rules, using laptop computers or slipping into another student's room. International students sometimes exploit time differences to contact family; there is a seven-hour gap between China and the United Kingdom, for instance.

  Houses often develop distinct characters, and rivalry between them is encouraged through sport. In some schools every house contains students of all ages, creating a vertical community where older students hold prefect status and some authority over younger ones. In others, separate houses serve different year groups. The house a student belongs to can shape friendships, loyalties, and a sense of belonging that outlasts the school years themselves.

• 3. A Global Patchwork

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  In China, there were around 100,000 boarding schools in rural areas of the mainland, with roughly 33 million children living in them. Some children in China are sent to boarding schools at the age of two. The majority of these schools are located in the western regions of the country, which are generally less wealthy than the east and center.

  In Ghana, the majority of secondary schools are boarding institutions. In India, boarding schools are affiliated with a range of educational boards including CBSE, ICSE, and the International Baccalaureate, and are operated by both private entities and governmental bodies. Notable government-run examples include the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya and the Ekalavya Model Residential School.

  Switzerland took a different approach entirely. The Swiss government developed a deliberate strategy of fostering private boarding schools for foreign students as an economic sector. The Swiss Federation of Private Schools organizes a large network of schools that offer instruction in several major languages. Among the most expensive boarding schools in the world are Swiss institutions: Institut auf dem Rosenberg, Institut Le Rosey, Beau Soleil, College du Leman, College Champittet, and Leysin American School. In 2015, a Swiss boarding school called A+ World Academy was established aboard the Norwegian tall ship Fullriggeren Sorlandet, a sailing school that brings education to ports around the world.

  In the former Soviet Union, boarding schools known as Internat-schools served multiple functions. Some were specialized academic centers tied to major universities, preparing students in fields like mathematics, physics, and languages. In the 1960s, Soviet officials established a new category called AESC, or Advanced Educational Scientific Center. Only a few of these remain today, in Moscow, Novosibirsk, and Yekaterinburg. Canada's largest independent boarding school is Columbia International College, with an enrollment of 1,700 students from around the world.

• 4. The British Tradition

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  The practice of sending boys to literate clerics for education is recorded in U.K. records going back over 1,000 years. By early medieval times, boys were being sent to monasteries or placed as pages in great households. In the 12th century, the Pope ordered all Benedictine monasteries, including Westminster, to provide charity schools. Those schools attracted paying students, and public schools grew out of that process.

  The classic British boarding school became especially prominent during the expansion of the British Empire. Colonial administrators working abroad could send their children back to the United Kingdom to be raised in British culture. Local rulers in the territories were offered the same educational access for their sons. More junior expatriates sent their children to British-run schools closer to home, which admitted selected local children as well. The boarding school, with its built-in values and culture, served as a mechanism for spreading British ideals through the governing class of the empire.

  By 1998, there were 772 private-sector boarding schools in the United Kingdom, with more than 100,000 children attending them. About one percent of British children are sent to boarding schools. Children as young as five to nine years old can be enrolled. Eton and Winchester are the two schools cited most often as symbols of elite boarding education; both have produced several prime ministers.

  The reasons families give for choosing boarding school do not always match the real ones. One reason frequently stated is the desire to broaden a child's horizons beyond what the family can offer. Another is the aspiration to have a child mix on equal terms with children of the upper classes. But the source notes that these stated reasons may conceal other motivations: the child may be considered disobedient or underachieving, the parents may be divorced, or the parents may simply not relate well to the child. Such reasons are rarely spoken aloud, though the child often senses them.

• 5. Forced Assimilation in North America

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  In the late 19th century, the United States government adopted a policy of educating Native American youth in the ways of Western culture so that they might assimilate into dominant society. The boarding schools established under this policy were managed and regulated by the government, and the education delivered inside them was shaped by Victorian ideas about gender.

  Boys and girls were separated in almost every activity. Girls were taught skills intended for the domestic sphere: sewing, cooking, canning, ironing, child care, and cleaning, as recorded by Adams. Boys were directed toward an agricultural model, learning plowing, planting, field irrigation, care of livestock, and the maintenance of fruit orchards, also documented by Adams. These lessons ran directly against the structure of many indigenous communities, which were organized along matrilineal lines. Women in those communities held powerful roles as leaders, healers, and farmers.

  Native American children resisted. The source notes that while children were exposed to the imposed ideals and likely adopted some of them, many rejected the gender norms being pressed upon them. Canada ran a parallel system: the Canadian Indian residential school system was also a mechanism of forced assimilation, separating indigenous children from their families and cultures.

  The oldest junior boarding school in the United States, for students below the age of 13, is the Fay School in Southborough, Massachusetts, established in 1866. Public boarding schools, once common in rural New England before universal public education existed, are extremely rare today. As of the 2013-2014 school year, the SEED Foundation administered public charter boarding schools in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland. One rural exception is Crane Union High School in Crane, Oregon, where more than 80 students, most of them from remote ranches, board during the school week to avoid a one-way commute of up to 240 kilometers across Harney County.

• 6. Deep Structure and Class

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  Sociologists Peter Cookson and Caroline Hodges coined the phrase "deep structure socialization" in 1985 to describe what elite boarding schools actually do. The idea is that these schools control not just the physical lives of students but their emotional lives as well.

  Students at elite university-preparatory boarding schools for ages 13 to 18 are raised with the assumption that they are meant to control society. Significant numbers of them enter politics or join the financial elite in fields like international banking and venture capital. The social pressure for conformity can be severe; the source describes one studied school where several students abused performance drugs like Adderall and Ritalin, both for academic results and to control weight.

  Seating in the refectory, or dining hall, becomes a visible map of the social order. Students form cliques organized by wealth and social background. Girls, the source notes, could be observed openly accepting that they would only marry for money and selecting only wealthy or affluent males as partners. Students suppress emotional sensitivity to rank higher in the social hierarchy, and this shapes their perceptions of gender and social roles well into adult life.

  Nick Duffell, the author of "Wounded Leaders: British Elitism and the Entitlement Illusion," argues that the education of the elite in British boarding schools produces a cadre of leaders who perpetuate a culture of elitism, bullying, and misogyny that affects the whole of society. Peter W. Cookson Jr., writing in 2009, suggested the elitist tradition has declined somewhat due to the development of the modern economy and the political rise of the liberal west coast of the United States. The old-boy network, built on shared school experience, remains a recognized social structure. Studies show that about 90% of boarding school students acknowledge that living in what amounts to a total institution has significantly changed their perception of and interaction with social relationships.

• 7. Boarding School Syndrome

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  In 2011, psychotherapist Joy Schaverien coined the term "boarding school syndrome" to identify a specific set of lasting psychological problems observable in adults who were sent away to school at an early age.

  The mechanism, as Schaverien describes it, begins with the sudden and often irrevocable loss of a child's primary attachments. Bullying and sexual abuse, by staff or by other children, may follow. Attachment to new figures becomes unsafe. To survive the environment, children develop what Schaverien calls a defensive and protective encapsulation of the self. The true identity of the person remains hidden, and this distorts intimate relationships into adult life.

  British psychotherapist Nick Duffell calls adults who have gone through this process "boarding school survivors." The behaviors he describes include a sense of detachment from any relationships, workaholism, compulsive behavior, and a drive to control. George Monbiot, who attended boarding school as a boy, went so far as to attribute some dysfunctions of the U.K. government to the institution itself.

  Robert Graves, the British classicist and poet who lived from 1895 to 1985, attended six different preparatory schools as a young child in the early 20th century. He wrote with precision about the divided self that emerged. His words: "Preparatory schoolboys live in a world completely dissociated from home life. They have a different vocabulary, a different moral system, even different voices." He observed that on returning to school from the holidays, the switch from home-self to school-self was almost instantaneous, while the reverse took a fortnight at least. He recalled calling his own mother "Please, matron" when caught off guard. The European Union-Canada project titled "Child Welfare Across Borders," carried out in 2003, formally classified boarding schools as one form of permanent displacement of the child, reflecting a shift in how child development research views long-term separation from parents.

• 8. On the Page and Screen

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  The boarding school as a literary setting took hold in the late Victorian period and developed into a recognizable genre with its own conventions. A typical protagonist in these stories breaks school rules for honorable reasons the reader can sympathize with, risks punishment, and usually stops short of outright rebellion against the institution itself.

  The earliest notable example is Sarah Fielding's "The Governess, or The Little Female Academy," published in 1749. Charles Dickens used the setting in "Nicholas Nickleby" in 1838. Charlotte Bronte wrote both "Jane Eyre" in 1847 and "Villette" in 1853. Thomas Hughes gave the genre its most durable template with "Tom Brown's Schooldays" in 1857. Charles Hamilton, writing as Frank Richards, created Greyfriars School in 1910 and produced 1,670 stories from it, many featuring Billy Bunter. George Orwell argued in his 1940 essay "Boys' Weeklies" that Frank Richards had cultivated a taste for public school stories among readers who could never have attended such schools.

  J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, published between 1997 and 2007, is the most widely read inheritor of the tradition. Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry operates as a classic British boarding school with houses, prefects, and a system of authority reproduced in magical form. The series brought the boarding school genre to a global audience that had grown up without any personal experience of the institution.

  Brazilian writer Raul Pompeia published "O Ateneu" in 1888, an early example outside the British tradition that dealt openly with homosexuality in the boarding school context. The North American strand of the genre includes J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" from 1951, John Knowles's "A Separate Peace" from 1959, and David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" from 1996. The film "Dead Poets Society," released in 1989, brought the setting to a mass cinema audience and remains one of the most recognized depictions of the form.