Sending your children off to boarding school was clearly a very common thing to do in the not-too-distant past in England, at least at the middle to upper levels of society. I suspect it is not as common now. Horrid tales of what went on at boarding school were a staple of English fiction and a seemingly essential part of every famous Englishman’s autobiography.
Why? What was the reasoning behind it? Was it thought that children received a better education if it was full immersion? Did the best schools insist on it? Did the parents just not like having their children under their feet all the time? Was it because of transport issues (the local schools weren’t as good and the best schools too far away to travel every day)?
What’s the story with the English and boarding school?
Look at when the prestigious public schools were founded:
King’s School, Canterbury - 597
Eton College - 1440
Rugby School - 1567
Harrow School - 1572
Charterhouse School - 1611
(And that’s only a very small sample).
What state funded options existed when those schools were founded?
The wealthy could afford to send their children to schools, whilst the lower classes could not, they stayed home and worked to support the family.
The children of the wealthy (as in those who could afford Eton or King’s) didn’t spend much time with their parents, they had nannies and such. So packing the kids off to school was no hardship on the parents. And it was seen as preparing the children for later life as either a gentleman or wife.
The wealthy continue to send their children to these schools because of the cache that attending Eton or Rugby etc still carries. You also get to make connections that aid in later life. There’s also a fair amount of snobbery involved.
Szlater more or less nailed it. In the past, it was done because commuting simply wasn’t practical in the 16th century. It continued in some of the same vein that the military school ethos works in America - send the boy off to school and let him be toughened up a bit. IME, boarding school certainly does toughen you up… or makes you gay.
Various reasons, one of the reasons was kind of “boot camp” for previledged youth. Rather end up the molly coddled sons of the elite, they would be treated like absolute dirt, in cold dorms, with appaulling food, and brutal treatment, irregardless of who their parent were. The theory being just like army recruits they would end up tougher for it, it didn’t always work that way, but thats the theory.
One reason that it still continues today is also the children of people working overseas and diplomats families. I know a few people who were sent to boarding school because their parents were not working in areas you would want to raise a child or didn’t feel the child could get a good education where they were. It seemed to be felt that it was better to be around children their own age ( and in the past, in their own culture) than be raised by a nanny in an empty house or in a warzone.
Personal experience, most of my fathers generation was packed off to boarding school for this reason. (EDIT - though my father himself was sent for the reason **tirial ** states, he was an army officer’s son who’s father was regularly sent off to far flung locals at short notice)
I’d also recommend reading any description of the childhood of royalty or aristocracy in the 1800s or 1900s this is definitely part of the reason they sent their children there.
Because there always were only a small number of private schools that provided the appropriate level of education. Even wealthy families wouldn’t always have one in their immediate area. If the school was more than a cycle-ride away, they would have to stay there all the time.
These school stories usually had a few references to the day boys, who were exactly the same as any other pupil, but lived locally, and went home at night.
I think it’s fair to say that that’s how parents often saw boarding schools, particularly in the earlier half of the 20th century. I don’t think there was a conscious effort on the part of administrators to provide a “brutal” environment, though; from what I can tell, they probably thought the food was good.
I went to a school that was a little unusual in that it was state school (taxpayer funded) but also a (part) boarding school. 20% or so of the kids boarded. The most obvious effect of this was that we were able to pay teachers higher salaries than in the regular state schools. Our exam results were extremely good, but then the intake was selective, so it’s hard to see what might have been cause and what was effect.
Off-topic a bit, but in the interest of ‘fighting ignorance’, there is no evidence that gay experiences at boarding school will “make you gay”. In fact, the evidence seems to be that people’s sexual orientation is determined long before that, by age 3-4 or so. And current evidence seems to be trending toward identifying an actual physical, genetic difference controlling this. So people are born gay or not, depending on their genes.
They might not have any actual sexual experience (gay or straight) until boarding school, but that doesn’t change their sexual orientation.
My impression though is that there must have been a bit of tradition going on beyond the practical reasons. Szlater, you list certain very old schools, but my impression is that there were many, many more boarding schools than just the elite you list, and the practice may have started in the 16th C but it was still going in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Certainly tradition has always played a part. It does still with most private schools. Families tend to value highly their ongoing connections with certain schools. I went to the school that I attended because my father had gone there. My sister has her own daughters booked in at the school that she attended. My nephews are currently at a boarding school in Sydney that their grandfather and uncle attended.
From the Squire’s musing before sending Tom off to school in Tom Brown’s Schooldays:
It’s the passage Lytton Strachey quotes in his classic chapter on Dr. Arnold, the most famous headmaster of Rugby, in Eminent Victorians to illustrate what “the great mass of English parents” saw as the point of the system.
This is very misleading. The older and grander public schools almost always began as charitable foundations which provided scholarships, often with the explicit aim of enabling poorer boys to receive an education. Some were even funded by the state, in the sense that they had received their endowments from royal patrons. The classic example on both counts would be Eton. Henry VI never envisaged that it would take fee-paying pupils.
The original reason why the upper classes sent boys away to boarding schools is actually much simpler. In pre-modern England most boys from all classes were sent away from home during adolescence. This was usually so that they could become an apprentice or, most often of all, enter service in another household. Part of the thinking was that it was easier to discipline someone else’s son rather than your own. So sending away those of them who were still receiving an education seemed obvious.
The key shift, which happens roughly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was that the upper classes began to see more advantage in sending their sons away to public school and then on to university and/or the inns of court, rather than, as had been the case in the past, sending them away to serve in one of the great noble households.
I’d second the “practical” aspect. In times past you couldn’t expect the “officer class” or “gentry” to rub shoulders with their subordinates and finding a suitable tutor or governess could be hit and miss. Result ? the offspring were sent off to school to network, become fully socialised and get a decent education.
The in-laws, both in their mid seventies, are both products of boarding school
son of a rural vicar and ex-schoolmistress, He won a scholarship and escaped the local village school in North Wales and ended up being sent 200 miles away for a decent education* - it worked, he learnt very good English and became a doctor.
She was up north with relatives when war broke out, her parents went back to London leaving her and her brother with relatives and their “governess” (actually an 18 or 19 year old French au pair who couldn’t get back home); the brother was sent away to school asap and later so was she. The schools were out in the countryside safe from bombs and had real teachers. Once the war was over it made sense they stayed where they were.
*to Christ’s Hospital , still very much one of the charitable foundations mention byAPB
