Reply to Boarding School - Why or Why Not?

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[quote=Anonymous]My neighbor attended Choate.  She originally went for ice hockey, but ended up really enjoying the academic environment and feeling more at home compared to our local public school.  Our local public was very good, but socially she wanted more independence and a more intellectual atmosphere.

I think for the right kid those old NE boarding schools can be great.  It is a relatively safe place to be independent, there are high academic expectations, and the endowments at places like Exeter are higher than most colleges so there are a lot of resources.  It can be a fantastic intellectual atmosphere, and it can definitely push you out of your comfort zone having kids from all over the country and the world in high school.  There are some pretty great academic offerings tool.

That said, some kids are just not mature enough to live on their own.  I'm sure hazing and other bad things happen when you get a group of teenagers all together in one residential area.  I also heard from another friend who went to Taft that the obsession with achievement and drinking coffee to stay up all night studying during finals can be unhealthy.  Also, in the DC area there are so many great day school options, I can see how it would be less appealing than if you lived somewhere where the school options were not so great.

I don't have high school aged kids, so I can't speak from experience, but every time I see a conversation pop up about boarding school, there is always a huge number of parents who chime in that anyone who sends their kids to boarding school is a bad parent who wants to miss precious years with their kids and so on and so forth.  While I think that there is a very real concern that some high schoolers are not mature enough to live without parental supervision, I have to believe like everything else on this blog a huge component comes from what the parents are comfortable with rather than what is or is not actually good for their child and also a way of judging others and feeling superior about ones choices.  Most of the boarding school kids I know love their parents very much and have great relationships with them, and only decided to go to boarding school for the opportunities (academic and/or athletic) that were a better fit for them.[/quote]

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