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  3. [A]Among the reasons I wouldn’t send my own child to boarding school is that being around one’s adolescent peers 24 hours a day

[A]Among the reasons I wouldn’t send my own child to boarding school is that being around one’s adolescent peers 24 hours a day

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问题 [A]Among the reasons I wouldn’t send my own child to boarding school is that being around one’s adolescent peers 24 hours a day doesn’t seem particularly healthy. It makes the things that already loom large in high school—grades, clothes, sports, heartache, acne—loom even larger. Going home at night provides physical distance from the relentlessness of all teenagers, all the time, and, ideally, parents provide perspective. Although they might be dorky, parents know an important lesson about everything from serious hazing to the embarrassment of dropping a lunch tray in a crowded cafeteria: This, too, shall pass.
[B]Certainly teachers provide an adult perspective at boarding schools, but it’s a very unusual teacher who influences an adolescent as much as the average parent does. Furthermore, while many boarding school teachers knock themselves out on students’ behalf not just by teaching but also by coaching and running dorms, they’re undermined by lesser teachers who, rather than guiding students out of teenage pettiness, seem themselves to get sucked down into it. There is on every boarding school campus some variation on the teacher who, if he’s not actually buying beer to ingratiate himself with the popular senior guys, sure seems to wish he could.
[C]In 1989, when I was 13 and living in Cincinnati, I waged a one-girl campaign to persuade my mother and father to let me attend Groton School in Massachusetts. Despite my parents’ ambivalence about boarding school, they ultimately acquiesced, I went, and I received a very good education—not all of it academic. More than a decade later, I couldn’t resist setting my first novel at a boarding school. Now at readings, I’m asked if I’d send my own child away to school, and I say no.
[D]For me, the question isn’t why parents wouldn’t send a child to boarding school as much as why they would. Unless there are either severe problems at home or flat-out terrible local schools, I don’t see the point. Even in the case of terrible schools, I’m not convinced that parents can’t significantly augment their children’s education. Among the advantages of boarding school are opportunities for independence, academic stimulation, small classes, peer companionship and the aforementioned campus beauty—but every single one of these opportunities is available at dozens of liberal arts colleges, so why not just wait a few years until the student will better appreciate such gifts and save $140,000?
[E]The self-containment of boarding schools can create terrariums of privilege in which students develop a skewed sense of money and have a hard time remembering that, in fact, it is not normal to go skiing in Switzerland just because it’s March, or to receive an S. U. V. in celebration of one’s 16th birthday. At, for example, Choate Rosemary Hall—one of many boarding schools starting classes this or next week—room, board and tuition for 2005-2006 is $35,360. If, as Choate’s Web site explains, 27% of students receive financial aid, that means the other 73% come from families that are, by just about any standards except perhaps their own, very rich. Even when these schools hold chapel services espousing humility and service to others, it’s the campus facilities—the gleaming multimillion-dollar gymnasium, say—that can send a louder message.
[F]It’s not that I see boarding schools as evil. I just don’t see them as necessary, and despite their often self-congratulatory rhetoric, I don’t see them as noble—certainly no more so than public schools.
[G]The person who asks the question usually is middle-aged and it seems highly likely that my questioner already is or soon will be a boarding-school parent. But it turns out I’m not alone: an increasing number of parents are deciding against boarding school. Enrollment at private day schools has grown 15% in the past decade, while enrollment at boarding schools has grown only 2. 7%. Overall boarding school enrollment dropped from about 42,000 in the late 1960’s to 39, 000 in the last school year—even though, according to the Census Bureau, the population of 14-to 17-year-olds was more than 1. 5 million higher in 2004 than in 1968.
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