BS experience vs. parental guidance

mountainhiker
Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:35:26 +0000

For what it’s worth - here’s my take as a parent with a 16-yo D and a 14-yo S, both leaving in the fall for first-time attendance at boarding school.

I know I will miss them terribly - I enjoy our kids immensely, and as they’ve grown and matured, I really and truly enjoy spending time with them. (OK, not always - we certainly have our share of teenage angst and arguments over curfews and how much time is reasonable to be plugged in to facebook, etc.) Since we have homeschooled, I’ve perhaps spent more time with them than other parents, and this makes the parting even more difficult. But this isn’t - it can’t! - be about what’s best or most comfortable for me. It’s about what they need, and what they can gain at these schools that they will never, ever be able to get by staying home.

Imagine two potted plants, sitting on your deck in the summer. Both are planted with top-quality annuals from a good nursery. One is planted in a good-sized container, filled with top-quality soil. It is placed in a prime spot - not too sunny, not too breezy, watered everyday, Miraclegro applied faithfully, spent blossoms pruned as needed. The other is stuck in an old pot that’s a bit small, filled with last year’s worn out soil. It’s placed in a corner where the sun beats down in the afternoon and the wind desicates the leaves, it’s only watered sporadically, and it never sees a drop of fertilizer.

The result - one plant will grow like topsy, meeting and probably exceeding the potential as advertised on the photo of a mature specimen that came with your little seedling. The other one - well, if you’re lucky it will still be alive at the end of the summer, but it’s probably going to look a little the worse-for-wear, and will have achieved a fraction of the growth of the other plant.

For us, the decision to send our kids to boarding school is the difference between our kids surviving” and “thriving.” If it wasn’t feasible, for a variety of reasons, to send them off to school, we would do our best (as we’ve done up till now!) to give them the opportunities we could. And if they weren’t admitted (as was the case for our son last year) we would continue to figure out ways to give them “proper care” and “Miraclegro” as we could. But because of where we live, and the options available here, they would never be able to get the same “growth environment” that they would at the schools where they will attend. Yes, we could find academic challenge for them (through homeschooling and community college and online classes), and drive hither and yon for the ECs they love, but there is one critical component that they can get at boarding school that we cannot give them here: a peer culture of other kids their age, bright, curious, who love to learn and will grow right along side with them.

Now, I don’t want to imply for a minute that the only way to “thrive” is to go away to boarding school - that is just not true. The vast majority of high school kids will never have the opportunity to attend a boarding school, but will still go on to lead amazing and meaningful lives. But for our kids, in our situation, it is clear that this is the best path they can take, so we are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to give them the “growth” environment of boarding school.