Articles on Education | Topics: education, educate, school, schools, schooling
by Bryan Underwood
One of the funny things about boarding high schools is that they usually serve one extreme or another. There is no such thing as a typical boarding high school. As a matter of fact, the only thing that unites high school boarding programs is that they cost a lot of money. You see, some boarding schools are meant to prepare the children of the rich to be the inheritors of the future. They are called college preparatory schools, and they are extremely difficult. Meanwhile, other ones are practically military high schools. They are meant for dropouts and delinquents, designed to whip them into shape and turn them into productive members of society. Don't get me wrong – the latter will get you a good education but the people enrolled are totally different and the philosophy is very strict.
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... all my letters are read. I like that. I usually put something in there that I would like the staff to see. If some of the staff are lazy and choose not to read the mail, I usually write on the envelope “Legal Mail.” This way it will surely be read. It’s important that we educate everybody as we go along.
| —Jean Gump, U.S. pacifist. As quoted in The Great Divide, book 2, section 10, by Studs Terkel (1988) |
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The boarding high school I went to, however, was one of the only ones that actually straddled the line. It wasn't quite a military high school, but it was close. I have never seen such a strange mix of students, and yet at the time I took it totally for granted. About half of the kids there were extremely high achievers from very prominent families, while the other half were delinquents. When I first got there, I was a little bit scared of some of the kids in the boarding school. It seemed like a terrible environment for a small, weak kid like me to be put into. I figured that I would be picked on every single day. To my surprise, however, that never happened. The boarding high school would not tolerate that kind of behavior. Things were so strict that people got the message pretty quickly: bullying was out of the question.At the time, I was furious with my parents for sending me to a boarding high school. My older brother had gone to a Montessori high school, and they had let him do practically anything he wanted. It seemed unjust for me to be sent to boarding high schools when my brother got so much more of a permissive environment. I had to leave my friends behind for the entire school year, and put up with disciplinarian teachers shouting at me at every turn. In the end, however, I was grateful for my parent's decision to send me to that boarding high school. It taught me discipline, something that my older brother never learned in his Montessori school.
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