Boarding-school kid here, and I am extremely loyal to my high school.
I was academically far above and socially far behind everyone in my public elementary and junior high. There was no sense of “community” there, and the students identified with each other more than they did with the school. It was that kind of stratification that perpetuated stereotypes on both ends. I don’t think I even remember the names of anyone I went to that school with.
But, in high school, the ideas of common good, shared learning, communal integrity, and a sort of extended-family atmosphere did more to shape me as a person than anywhere I’ve been before or since. I don’t think that I’d be as loyal or caring or as accepting of others had I not gone there.
At my high school, it was OK to play water polo in the fall, swim in the winter, and volunteer in the spring. I played football and wrote poetry, and you’d see more of my teammates at one of my readings than you would at one of the PS parties.
I can remember that once, most of the junior class had a punishing day of examinations in the middle of what was to be a difficult week anyway. So the junior class president met with the senior class president, who gathered the entire senior class the night before that day and marched us all down to the headmaster’s house, where we sang the school song long and loud enough to wake him up. In school tradition (we were generally allowed this twice or three times a year), our senior class president presented our demand for a holiday the following day, and promised on behalf of the senior class that we would not leave or stop singing until we got it; the headmaster ordered us home, we kept singing. He put on his HEADMASTER VOICE and ordered us home, and, the next morning, we had our Holiday.
The kind of inter-class loyalty and inter-student loyalty that you find in the private/boarding-school environment can’t happen on the public-school level. You might find smaller examples of it in a PS team or association, but it’s based on one aspect of the PS kids’ lives. The private school environment forces kids to accept each other on all faces, not just the most convenient ones.
The other side of it is that a private school generally treats kids more like adults than a public school does. A public school’s discipline, I have found, is more punitive, because the kids go home to their parents, or because the PS has to take more of a “big-box” approach to discipline because of the sheer number of kids. So there’s less anger at being punished and more realization that you’re being corrected when you are disciplined in order to fit you within the context of community life, rather than in order to discourage you from upsetting the apple-cart. This cuts down noticeably on bitterness.
In addition, the private schools have more money and a better environment to offer the more qualified and understanding teachers and administrators. So I felt much more grateful to the English teacher with the PhD who introduced me to Allen Ginsberg and Marcel Proust than I did to the the English teacher with the New Jersey State Certificate who took points off for spelling on an essay I wrote because she didn’t know the words I was using.
I’ll be at my 10-year reunion next year. I give as much as I can afford to my high school every year. Why? Not because I miss it and want to go back; I don’t. Not because it was the best time of my life; God knows it wasn’t.
But I am loyal and I give because if I am lucky enough to have children, I would like them to have the education and opportunity I did. And if I have a daughter, I’d trust her with a young man from my HS. And if I have a son, I’d know he couldn’t do much better than a young woman from my HS.
Everyone’s high school experience is awkward and hard to get through. But the dignity with which a kid is shepherded through that minefield is always better remembered than the actual mines.
