Yeah, I hear boarding school and I think maladjusted with detached parents. Is that a fair assessment?
There are therapeutic and religious boarding schools, and in foreign countries, it’s very common for the children of diplomats, missionaries, and other expats to attend boarding schools if they are too isolated and/or homeschooling isn’t an option. There are even public boarding schools, usually for G/T students; when I was in college, I dated a man who had attended this one. IIRC, there’s also a similar school in Minnesota, and other states may also have them. There are also the state schools for the blind and deaf, and possibly other specialized disabilities too.
Yes, it is all about admission requirements, family wealth and prestige. There are a number of very prestigious boarding schools in New England such as Phillips Andover, Exeter, Groton and St. Paul’s among many others. There are extremely expensive at 50K a year+ for everything and they serve as feeders into Ivy League universities. If you are a real screwup at one of them, you might get sent to Vanderbilt or Duke instead (those are excellent universities too). Everything about them is set up to groom future leaders and no expense is spared from classroom help to extracurricular activities.
I know lots of people that attended them and they have all done predictably well. I also have a family member that is a chef at St. Paul’s in Concord, New Hampshire. I talked to him about working there and he is always amazed how much money many of the student’s families have. They come in on private jets from all over the world. His job is to provide gourmet level food to them every day and cater to any specific special needs or desires. Most of them just want typical teenage American fare but he also gets some odd requirements as well.
There are lots of other different types of boarding schools all over the country that aren’t especially prestigious at all.
Why do you walk out in front of cars without looking? Do you think money makes you invulnerable to physics or driver’s poor reflexes?
Okay, okay, I would ask this of someone who went to Phillips Exeter, but *not *Phillips Andover. Andover kids don’t walk out into traffic the same way.
By golly, that’s good enough for me!
I would ask whether it was true that rich boarding school kids get drunk, do drugs, drive recklessly, cheat on exams, catch STD’s, etc., and daddy’s lawyers (and a big check to the school) always get them off the hook.
This could be said about the Catholic high school in every city I’ve ever lived in that had one. :rolleyes:
I went to one in the early 70s. It was/is a progressive co-ed Quaker boarding school and so not quite Miss Porter’s School for Girls in exclusivity. It was long ago and I have both good and not so good memories of it, when I can remeber it at all. 
I will say, in answer one of the posters above that at one assembly someone doing a social studies project asked if all the kids who came from “broken homes” could raise their hands. About 3/4 of the student body did so.
I graduated from a Catholic high school. It was heavily blue-collar, and nobody’s daddy had a lawyer on retainer or was rich enough to buy their kid’s way out of trouble.
Not that it stopped anyone from getting drunk, doing drugs, driving recklessly, cheating on exams, catching STD’s, etc. of course. That’s why I asked. I want to know if the consequences were different.
These schools WERE where the rich kids in these cities went, and that’s also true for the place where I live now.
Not at my school. At least not to my knowledge. A few kids with mildly famous parents got kicked out while I was there. I can’t recall the specific offenses, but it being the Age of Aquarius™ I assume it was drugs.
I went to a relatively posh boarding all girls school. My graduating class didn’t include anyone particularly famous, but there were ‘famous’ people in the years just ahead and just behind my class.
I wouldn’t say that our families were any more or less dysfunctional than any other collection of HS kids. I, along with a good third of my class, was on some sort of scholarship ranging from a token amount to a damn near full ride. Parents ranged from functionally illiterate to a PHD researcher to political appointees to people so rich they had no career to speak of. We had kids from Thailand to Ecuador to Japan to Saudi Arabia (Note: the Saudi kids were Americans whose parents worked for ARAMCO and school in the compound ended in 9th grade)
I got a damn good education and I made friends that I still have 25 years later, which is more than I can say for the friends I made in college. I was better prepared for life on my own than most of the people that arrived to start their freshman year of college with me.
If, god forbid, I was a teenager again, I would go back to the same school (and be a better student) and if I had a child that either wanted to go to boarding school or I thought would benefit from a particular type of boarding school, I would send them.
“Why” is what we asked our classmate who was a boarder. The school wasn’t terribly exclusive, and there were very few boarders left.
For my father and his brothers and multiple previous generations of the family, the answer had been “where else?”, as there simply hadn’t been any or many non-boarding options. For my classmate, it was “I got in trouble 'cos of politics”. We asked “what politics”, told him where the kind of people he’d gotten in touble fighting hung out and to avoid the place, which we all did anyway (and they in turn behaved like little angels when they came into a bar that didn’t belong to their party), and that was it.
Our son went to one, but he went as a non-boarding day student. There was some drug problems there and the kids got kicked out. I don’t know if they had legal problems beyond that. As far as I could tell he was not bullied there and I think I’d know as he was bullied at his previous school which is one main reason he went.
I’d say, “You’re gonna be Baird bums, the lot of ya. And Harry, Jimmy, Trent, wherever you are out there, FUCK YOU TOO!”
My wife went to a relatively prestigious top 50 private school. From what she describes, rather than being full of drug-addled future Patrick Batemans, most of the students were pretty serious about their academics and extracurricular.
And apparently lacrosse is a big thing at these school.
I went to public school (but in Southwest Connecticut), but I did encounter a lot of the type at summer camp and in college and business school. While I feel like they represent all sorts of personalities, one thing they all seem to have in common is a sense of being highly independent, but in a relatively safe and isolated way.
I recall one parent’s weekend back in college, some of the parents were asking why the jerkoffs in the fraternity house next door were running around with Jack-O-Lanterns on their heads in April. I told them their “parent’s weekend” mostly consisted of a check with a note saying something like “Dear Tucker, Having a great time with your new mom in Aspen. Here’s a check for books. Try not to spend it all at once ;)”
Well I knew of a woman who was raised in an all girl boarding school and she had trouble understanding a “normal” school and what typical kids did with their parents because she was so rarely exposed to it. Therefore she had to hire nannies and such.
Think about it. For her and other going to boarding school, school is everything. You live at the school. The teachers are your pseudo-parents. You really only go home at holidays and in the summer. If you have an issue their is no parent to turn to.
Also no such thing as a PTA. Parents have no involvement in the school. No room mothers. Parents rarely go to events at school like sports or recitals. Parents dont know a single teacher and rarely any other parents. No such thing as a bake sale.
So ask them, how do they transition so to speak, to being a “normal” parent and relating to a “normal” school?
Tell me, how did you learn to relate to a “nomral” school?
For example, at your boarding school I assume their was no such thing as a PTA and parents had little involvement. What was it like to send kids to a school where you as a parent are supposed to be involved?
At some of the New England prep schools, ice hockey is a big thing. The brother of a neighboring girl/classmate when I was growing up went to the Kent School on a hockey scholarship.
My boarding school was for high school as are the vast majority of US boarding schools
I went to a combination of public schools and catholic schools for K-8 in 2 different states (VA & VT). I don’t think room mothers were a thing nor PTA in my schools. I certainly never heard of them or saw any evidence of them. As for my HS, there was a parents association, whose activity waxed and waned over the years. In addition there were some parents who were very involved with the school and some who were less so. Some of it had to do with relative location of the parents to our school, some of it had to do with the talents that the parent had to contribute. My mom was never going to be a volunteer to these things, regardless of her financial situation, she just isn’t a joiner…
When I went to college, my main ‘issue’ was learning to care about what I looked like when going to class again. We had a dress code in HS but it didn’t address things like doing your hair or wearing makeup and since we were an all girls school, we didn’t bother for anything but mixers (dances) with other schools. And while I wouldn’t call it MY issue, there was a definite disconnect between how I behaved in my college classes and many of the other women at my small college in South Carolina. I spoke up in class and was willing and able to debate with the professors. This definitely was not the normal behavior for the women at my college and it was a bit off putting to both the men and women in my classes my Freshman year. My professors loved me though!
UK? Australia? US? It’s all different really, in terms of culture.
I sent my son to boarding school, although I wouldn’t call it exclusive. I know a guy who went to the exclusive boarding school here in the UK and I don’t know what I’d ask him about it - it seems rude, to be honest.
Cultural differences would make the whys and what happened theres and the how’d you get in sorts of questions quite difference. In Australia, kids go because they live miles from any good schools, or mum and dad have money. In the UK it’s family connections and money and if you can get in, scholarships which lead to opportunities to get into Oxbridge, or at least Russell Group.
Which doesn’t help you, OP. Sorry.