ConcernedFather

I went to AESD school twenty years ago. Had grown up overseas (Europe), and coming back to the US first to a public high school then to boarding school was a terrible challenge. My classmates didn't understand me, I dressed "weirdly" to them, I was culturally very different -- in short, I was a freak. But they respected me, in a weird way that I don't think would have happened in most public schools. Unfortunately, I couldn't handle BS academics. (My parents were hippies and I had never gone to a real school with GRADES and TESTS until going to the school I attended). I lasted two years at BS. Was kicked out and moved back to Europe for a while. I ended up never getting a high school diploma but went to one of then-and-now most fashionable Ivys, and I have lived overseas ever since. It's something I laugh about, now, the fact that I never graduated from HS. (I am quite successful in my very conservative profession, now, although I was in the US, teaching at private and public high schools, for a number of years after college.) I have two kids, both boarding school age, and I am sending them both despite the fact that (a) I am not hugely rich, (b) I am not sure it will get them into an Ivy more easily if than if they stay in our current country of residence, and (c), I miss the one who is already at boarding school terribly. So why am I doing it? Much of the time I was at my -- super conservative -- bs, I hated it.

I think I am doing it for the following reasons:
-- If you're smart, boarding school is to learning seemed to me then to be like trying to drink out of a fire house at full blast. It's a challenge, but if you can handle it, you can get much more volume.
-- Boarding school teaches you that you are responsible for your own destiny. Nobody pulls you out of the fire when you go down. (Although I think this is more true of AESD than the other St. Grottlesex institutions.) If you can handle the responsibility, it brings a lot of self-confidence to you when you pull it off.
-- Boarding school teaches you that you can be different, proudly. From what I know of families in the US, US public high schools can be conformist places. Indeed, great success at public high school, in my experience, is often a negative indicator for great intellectual success in later life. This is not universal -- and I am sure that I have already outraged some of you for saying this -- but at my BS, eccentricity was tolerated to a degree unimaginable in most public HS in the US today. And kids were allowed to flower in all sorts of unique ways at my BS. Even today, I am regularly amazed by all the cool things they've done since getting out of BS. My one child at BS today, living in the US for the first time, tells me that things haven't changed in that regard at all. There's a weird sense of tolerance for eccentric flowering at my child's boarding school that wasn't present at the public school (one of the best in the US, according to all the surveys) my child previously attended. In the end, I think that's why I am sending my kids to boarding school. It's true that it's not for everybody; but for people who are different, it can mean salvation.