<p>I also go to a boarding school- Interlochen Arts Academy. I’m sure 99.9% of the kids that attend asked their parents.
“enhanced opportunities to grow in a variety of areas (music, art, sports, etc.) are not worth the tradeoff”
most people are at my school because they want to be proffessional artists in their respective fields. Nowadays it is harder to get into an arts program in college than into an ivy league (1 out of every 300 girls are selected for top notch musical theatre programs), so we go to boarding school to get the advance arts training that we need a long with a much more advance academic curriculum to match our needs.
I have a great relationship with my parents, and I do think you’re right about establishing that before leaving the home.</p>
<p>In reviewing comments in this thread, someone indicated that their daughter said that “sending her to boarding school was the greatest gift her parents ever gave her.” That really made me stop and question whether we have indeed become a society in which we are way too focused on molding our children, from a young age, into experts in some particular area (art, music, math, etc.). Seems like our children are becoming more like human “doings” (doing all the right things to become a standout in some area) rather than human BEINGS. </p>
<p>If my own children told me that sending them to the outstanding colleges they graduated from was the “greatest gift I could have given them,” I would have felt disappointed. I would hope that the greatest gifts I gave them were my love, time and attention, and being there for them when they needed a shoulder to cry on, or a hug, or to share in the joys, sorrows and accomplishments of each day. The one thing I valued most in raising them was sitting at the dinner table, every night, as a family, with the television set off, and chatting about the days events. More was learned in those conversations than could be learned anywhere else.</p>
<p>I’m not placing my values on anyone else, because we all view things differently. I’m not saying that I was the perfect parent…far from it. Perhaps my views on adolescent development, education, and parenting are old-fashioned and outdated. Maybe I’ve completely missed the boat. I don’t know. Maybe I am “old NOT wise.”</p>
<p>Just because the child viewed boarding school as one of her greatest gifts does in no way imply that she wanted to go to boarding school to “master” some specific discipline or to gain some skill to get ahead in life.</p>
<p>oldbutwise –
As for the second paragraph, I really don’t know what to say. You basically twisted the words of another poster to repeat your earlier assertion that to be a fully loving, caring, and accessible parent is mutually exclusive with being the parent of a boarding school student. </p>
<p>From first hand experience, I was frequently in contact with my parents over the phone or over the internet when I wasn’t at home for three months of summer or the month of vacation time dispersed throughout the school year. In fact, going to boarding school made me appreciate my parents a lot more, and we developed a stronger bond as a result.</p>
<p>Boarding school is just college 4 years earlier in my opinion.</p>
<p>I went to a boarding school for 3 years. The reasons I went:</p>
<p>1) The inner-city high school I would otherwise have attended was bad and getting worse. In teacher conferences, my parents were actually advised by some teachers in so many words to get me and my brother out! My parents would have considered sending me to a local private or parochial school (like they did my brother), except:</p>
<p>2) I got a scholarship opportunity to go to one of the top prep (boarding) schools in the country (long story), so the cost to my parents was actually at or below what a local school would have been. The presentation by the admissions director who came to visit my hometown made the place seem pretty diffficult to resist.</p>
<p>What I found/got out of it:</p>
<p>1) Absolutely no comparison about the challenge and quality of my education, the place was in a totally different league from my school at home. Don’t know if the differences would have been as stark as compared to a rich suburban school. When I got to college, the transition to college work was pretty much seamless.
2) I didn’t have to worry about my personal safety.
3) I met some incredibly smart annd interesting people I would not otherwise have met, and learned (more or less) to live and work with them on a rgular basis.
4) Due to my relatively low socioeconomic status was made to feel socially inferior.
5) really missed interactions with girls,</p>
<p>Hope this helps</p>
<p>PS: at my boarding school, it would be a bit of a mistake to say that kids or faimilies who went there were overly “ambitious”. For the rich kids, privilege and advantage (present and future) were just taken for granted. For me and many of the other scholarship kids, it was an adventure in itself, most did not come thinking about it as just a means to other ends.</p>